Ukraine moves to build domestic AI computing capacity with Kyivstar

Kyivstar moved to build domestic AI computing capacity in Ukraine, a wartime bet on keeping sensitive data and processing power inside the country as missile strikes and infrastructure stress make foreign-cloud dependence riskier. The carrier said the first phase could require at least 3 to 5 megawatts of capacity and tens of millions of dollars, with parent VEON Ltd. providing financial backing.

The company signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine’s Economy Ministry at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk, tying the project directly to national rebuilding and digital sovereignty. Oleksandr Komarov, Kyivstar’s chief executive, said domestic demand for AI compute is still limited, but the strategic case is clear: local businesses that are too small to draw direct attention from global cloud operators still need access to advanced computing.

Komarov also pointed to the military dimension. He said the biggest consumer of Ukrainian AI now is the military, and that military computing cannot run somewhere outside Ukraine. That makes the project more than a commercial data-center expansion. It is a response to a security problem created by war, where keeping workloads at home can reduce exposure to foreign jurisdiction, cross-border outages and supply-chain dependence.

The effort builds on a year-long push to localize Ukraine’s AI stack. On June 17, 2025, Kyivstar and the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s WINWIN AI Center of Excellence signed a memorandum to begin development of a national Ukrainian large language model. On September 29, 2025, Kyivstar said it had started integrating AI technologies into its cloud platform so Ukrainian businesses and government institutions could deploy AI tools inside a domestic environment. On December 1, 2025, Kyivstar and WINWIN selected Google Gemma as the base model for the national LLM, with training initially using Google’s Vertex AI infrastructure before shifting to Ukrainian data centers. By January 7, 2026, Kyivstar said the project had reached a key stage.

The project also fits Kyivstar’s scale as one of Ukraine’s core communications assets. VEON said Kyivstar served nearly 22.4 million mobile customers and more than 1.1 million fixed-line home internet customers as of June 30, 2025. VEON’s 2025 annual reporting said Kyivstar had more than 600 B2B cloud clients and 70,000 end-users, giving the company a built-in base for domestic AI services.

Kyivstar has also been hardening the power side of the business. In May 2026, it acquired six solar power plants in the Lviv region with a combined capacity of 105 megawatts, a sign that the company is thinking about energy resilience alongside digital capacity. In a country at war, the question is no longer whether AI infrastructure is symbolic. For Kyivstar, it is becoming part of the physical and economic backbone of self-reliance.