Ukraine has announced plans to build a national computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Although the project is intended to strengthen national security and reduce the country’s dependence on foreign suppliers, for the time being it remains primarily a declaration requiring huge investment and time.
During the Ukraine Reconstruction Conference in Gdańsk, the Ukrainian operator Kyivstar signed a memorandum with the Ministry of Economy concerning the development of national computing capacity for AI. Funding for the first phase is to be provided by the operator’s owner, the VEON Group. According to Kyivstar’s CEO, Oleksandr Komarov, the initial phase will require infrastructure with a capacity of between 3 and 5 MW and investments running into tens of millions of dollars.
The most important argument behind the project is security. As Komarov emphasises, the military is currently the largest user of AI solutions in Ukraine. This means that processing data outside the country’s borders is not considered an acceptable solution from a national security perspective.
At the same time, the project highlights the scale of the challenges facing the Ukrainian technology sector. Following the Russian invasion, a significant portion of state data was transferred to data centres in Europe. Microsoft confirms that this was a necessary step to protect the digital infrastructure from attacks. A return to local processing will therefore require the rebuilding not only of server rooms, but also of the entire technology ecosystem.
Experts point out that Ukraine’s current demand for AI computing power remains relatively low. This means that the economic case for building its own infrastructure may currently be weaker than the arguments relating to security and digital sovereignty. On the other hand, local computing centres could facilitate access to AI services for smaller Ukrainian businesses, which are not attractive customers for global cloud providers.
During the conference, Patrycja Sokalska-Pomacho, Nvidia’s representative for Central and Eastern Europe, pointed out that Ukraine still lacks the infrastructure to retain the value of operational, linguistic and cultural data within the country. This is one of the reasons why the development of domestic data centres has become part of the country’s reconstruction strategy.
The project also forms part of Ukraine’s earlier efforts to develop its own AI models. Kyivstar has previously collaborated with the state administration on a Ukrainian language model based on Google’s open-source Gemma model. However, there is still a long way to go from the signing of the memorandum to the launch of modern AI infrastructure, and the success of the project will depend on both funding and the geopolitical situation.
