In a world that is fragmenting into blocs—trade wars, sanctions, technology controls, and a widening gap between security competition and economic interdependence—‘middle powers’ are suddenly fashionable again. But the label is often treated as a personality trait: countries that are ‘balanced’, ‘constructive’, and ‘multilateral’.
That framing is too soft for the moment we are in. The middle powers that will matter in the late 2020s will not be those that merely say the right things in global forums. They will be the ones that can host difficult conversations, move goods across contested geographies, and process data at scale inside their own jurisdictions.
That is the playbook Kazakhstan assembled throughout 2025: convening, corridors, and compute. It is a practical strategy for resilience when great-power competition is increasingly fought through supply chains and platforms rather than only through treaties and summits.
Updating multi-vectorism for a new era
Start with convening. The diplomatic world still rewards states that can keep doors open when others close them. But convening today is less about grand rhetoric and more about offering usable formats—spaces where competing actors can show up without paying an excessive political price for doing so. Kazakhstan has leaned into this niche for years, but 2025 underlined how deliberately it is institutionalising the role.
On the geopolitical track, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s participation in the Central Asia–US C5+1 summit in Washington in November signalled that Astana wants structured engagement with the United States on hard-edged, future-facing files – critical minerals, infrastructure, and AI.
Kazakhstan also last year hosted the second China–Central Asia summit in Astana, which produced the Astana Declaration and a Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation between China and the five Central Asian states, an unusually strong diplomatic instrument for a region that is wary of overcommitment. And Tokayev’s state visit to Russia reinforced that Kazakhstan is not abandoning its northern vector even as it deepens ties elsewhere.
The more revealing element is that Kazakhstan is trying to update multi-vectorism for a new era: not simply balancing relationships, but building platforms that make balancing possible. That is why the year also featured Astana’s broader ‘dialogue infrastructure’: the Astana International Forum, the Astana Think Tank Forum, and the VIII Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, which brought over 100 delegations from around 60 countries and culminated in an ‘Astana Declaration of Peace 2025’. In a fractured environment, the ability to convene diverse actors repeatedly becomes a form of state capacity. It creates networks, predictability, and a reputation for ‘usable neutrality’.
Scaling the East–West backbone
Convening, however, is not enough. Middle powers that can only talk are increasingly irrelevant. What gives convening weight is the ability to deliver tangible connectivity—the ‘pipes’ part of the playbook. Here, 2025 was marked by infrastructure designed to convert geography into leverage without turning the country into a mere transit appendage of larger powers.
The flagship example is the second railway line on the Dostyk–Moyynty route, officially launched on September 30, a project that materially increases capacity on a key China-border corridor. The figures are not cosmetic: capacity rising from 12 to 60 pairs of trains per day, container speed up to 1,500 km/day, and cargo volumes through the Dostyk–Alashankou crossing reportedly growing fivefold, alongside an overall 42 per cent increase in transport volumes. Whatever the precise baseline comparisons, the strategic intention is clear: Kazakhstan is scaling the East–West backbone that makes it indispensable to Eurasian trade flows.
The corridor strategy increasingly looks like system-building. The launch of a container hub in Aktau is meant to handle growing flows on the Middle Corridor. A Kazakh multimodal terminal in Georgia’s port of Poti (with a stated capacity of 120,000 containers per year) provides Black Sea access. If documentation time truly drops by 40–50 per cent, as claimed, that is a competitiveness move in a corridor market where reliability matters as much as distance.
This is where the middle-power logic becomes more concrete. By hosting diplomacy and building corridors, Kazakhstan is positioning itself as a connective state. But connectivity now depends as much on data as on steel. Which brings us to the third element: compute.
Inclusion and reach
The fight over technology is increasingly a fight over where data is stored, where models are trained, and whose standards govern digital life. Kazakhstan’s 2025 narrative suggests it wants to be more than a consumer in that landscape. The Digital Bridge 2025 forum in Astana in October featured the launch of alem.ai, described as an AI ecosystem that combines training and start-up support. This is the soft side of compute: building a pipeline of engineers, founders, and implementers who can translate ambition into deployment.
The hard side is infrastructure. Kazakhstan highlighted the launch of an AI compute cluster based on NVIDIA H200 GPUs, presented as the most powerful in Central Asia and central to a national AI platform. Alongside this, there is a governance layer: an AI law establishing rules for safe deployment, including banning AI use for manipulation. There are also inclusion and reach elements, such as the official start of Starlink paired with an agreement obliging compliance with Kazakhstan’s laws. Whatever one thinks of satellite internet geopolitics, the state’s choice to legalise and regulate it reflects a broader point: connectivity and compute are being treated as sovereign policy domains, not just private-sector conveniences.
Then comes the national language models. Kazakhstan presented Alem LLM as a major Kazakh-language model intended to support government services and domestic AI products, with claims of strong performance on Kazakh-language tasks. For states outside the ‘AI superpowers’, language is a strategic vulnerability: if your public services, education, and information space depend on external models and external clouds, you import not just technology but also dependencies. Building national capability, even imperfect capability, signals an intent to reduce that exposure over time.
The infrastructure of relevance
Put these three strands together and Kazakhstan’s 2025 message becomes more legible: We are building the infrastructure of relevance. Convening creates diplomatic options. Corridors create economic options. Compute creates technological options. Each reinforces the others. A state that hosts high-level dialogue becomes more credible as a corridor partner. A state that moves trade becomes more attractive as a venue for negotiation. A state that can process data domestically becomes a safer place for investment, innovation, and regional digital services.
Of course, the playbook comes with risks. Corridor strategies can be disrupted by geopolitics, sanctions regimes, or a slowdown in China–EU trade. Digital sovereignty can become a slogan if workforce development and implementation capacity lag behind hardware announcements. AI regulation can become performative if enforcement is weak. And convening only matters if partners continue to see Astana as a place where engagement does not come with hidden alignment. Maintaining that trust will be harder as competition between major powers sharpens.
Still, middle powers are often advised to pick a niche. Kazakhstan appears to be picking a niche that fits the era: the ability to host, connect, and compute. If the 2020s are a decade when the world is reorganised through networks rather than treaties, then the countries that can build and operate those networks will shape outcomes disproportionate to their size. Kazakhstan is betting that, in this environment, being the place where dialogue happens, trade flows, and data is processed is not just useful—it is power.
Photo: Dreamstime.
