NVIDIA Vice President meets with Kazakhstani Students

The Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Sayasat Nurbek, met with NVIDIA’s Vice President for Global AI Infrastructure Development, Nicolo Caprese, as well as the co-founders of Firebird.AI. The delegation also met with students and the leadership of Nazarbayev University and congratulated the finalists of the DeepTech Bäige startup competition.

During the visit, the delegation was introduced to the university’s research infrastructure and key strategic initiatives, including the launch of the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), focused on advancing mathematical sciences and AI. Provost Rehan Sadiq said the university aims to deepen industry collaboration through ISSAI’s products and further strengthen its focus on innovation as part of Kazakhstan’s emerging digital economy.

Minister Nurbek emphasized the university’s role as one of the region’s leading research institutions and underscored the importance of building an ecosystem closely integrated with industry.

«NU is Kazakhstan's flagship research- intensive university with really good fundamental research, and now our goal is to deliver real impact – on industry, society and economic growth. We are moving from good to great by focusing on multidisciplinary research and bringing together top talent to create real-time impact through applied projects», – he said.

Nico Caprez supported the initiative of NU to join the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute University Ambassador Program, highlighting the strong potential for expanding cooperation in talent development.

The program enables faculty members to undergo specialized training through NVIDIA’s advanced courses in artificial intelligence, data analytics, and high-performance computing. Upon successful completion of the training and interview process, participants are awarded the status of official ambassadors. As certified NVIDIA ambassadors, they are authorized to deliver courses independently and issue internationally recognized certificates to students.

Kazakhstan already has successful examples of this model in practice. For instance, Olzhas Olzhayev, a faculty member at the International University of Information Technologies, has certified 168 students and achieved Platinum status.

In addition, Yerzhan Galymzhanuly Kenzhebek – Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University – successfully completed the course Data Parallelism: How to Train Deep Learning Models on Multiple GPUs and has certified more than 60 students.

These results demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the program and its strong potential for scaling AI talent development within Kazakhstan’s higher education system.

«Our company would like to not only do research, but productize it, it's really important for us. So I'm sure there's some partnership here that we can explore too, and generally the conditions that you create here, for the students, but also for companies such as NVIDIA, to come and make an impact here is fantastic to see. NVIDIA has 45,000 employees today, and we're growing every day. We've seen great students here, so we'd love to give them the opportunity to join NVIDIA as well, so just encourage them to apply to NVIDIA», – he said.

The parties also discussed the possibility of opening an NVIDIA office within the university’s planned research park, as well as the company’s potential involvement in the development of a future data center.

Particular attention was given to the potential application of NVIDIA’s technological expertise in building high-performance GPU infrastructure, demand for which is rapidly increasing due to the growth of artificial intelligence, big data processing, and the deployment of national digital platforms.

The implementation of such projects could become an important step toward developing Kazakhstan’s modern computing infrastructure and strengthening its position as a regional hub in the fields of AI and high-performance computing (HPC).

The visit concluded with a meeting between the NVIDIA delegation and finalists of the DeepTech Bäige competition at the NU Onergy Creative Hub. The final cohort featured 11 promising deep tech student projects spanning agri-tech, mining, energy management and EV charging, drug discovery, biomedical screening and oncology, as well as autonomous drones, robotics and aerospace technologies.