Coal in Kazakhstan, solar in Dubai: diverse data centre power plans

Details: Vaughan O'Grady; Category: Energy & Sustainability; 26 January 2026; 346 views

Two very different approaches to powering data centres are making headlines in Dubai and Kazakhstan: one, which has been under way for some time, is solar-focused, the other, very much on the drawing board, may use coal.

The utility Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has said it has approved the awarding of the second phase of the solar-powered green data centre in the Warsan area in eastern Dubai. The first phase of the data centre is scheduled to be launched in the second half of 2026.

The green data centre is said to be the fourth such facility in Moro Hub, a subsidiary of Digital DEWA, the digital arm of DEWA. Covering 66,000 square metres, the facility will have a planned capacity of more than 100 megawatts (MW).

Meanwhile Kazakhstan has suggested developing a so-called ‘data centre valley’ in the north-eastern region of Pavlodar. The facilities built there could, according to the government, use the energy resources of the Ekibastuz coal basin to meet the significant amount of power they will require.

Other power sources seem to be in short supply in Kazakhstan. The country’s first nuclear plant, currently in planning with Russia’s Rosatom, is not scheduled to come online until 2035. However, Kazakhstan has huge coal reserves, estimated at 33 billion tons, enough to last 300 years at present consumption levels.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has apparently instructed the government to present a proposal by 20 March to grant coal generation the status of a national project.

However, as news resource Data Centre Dynamics says, Kazakhstan is far from a data centre hotspot, albeit it is trying to diversify its economy. The data centre valley initiative is said to be part of Kazakhstan’s broader goal to develop a fully-fledged digital economy by 2029.

That said, we announced in December last year that Veon-owned telco Beeline Kazakhstan had kicked off construction of a Tier III hyperscale data centre in Almaty that aims to serve as the anchor for Kazakhstan’s sovereign cloud, AI compute and enterprise digital services ecosystem.