Will Kazakhstan's new Bitcoin mining strategy evolve into an AI compute playbook?

The decree that Kazakhstan’s President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, signed in July to allow oil producers to run a direct flared gas to off-grid electricity funnel for the country’s buzzing crypto mining industry has raised a recent existential question about whether the more lucrative opportunity of the AI compute sector could hijack that infrastructure. 

The question becomes pertinent as companies continue to make the jump from digital asset mining to AI computing, including Crusoe, which pioneered the strategy Kazakhstan is now exploring, which abandoned Bitcoin mining for AI infrastructure in July 2025. 

Kazakhstan’s new decree to optimize Bitcoin mining 

The decree that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed in July gave the green light for oil producers to burn otherwise-flared gas for off-grid generation, which can then be used to generate electricity for digital mining, Interfax-Kazakhstan reported.

That excess power redirection is only on the table when those resources are not needed for state purposes. 

The same decree, put out by the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development (MAIDD), also proposed carving out an exemption for regulated crypto income from personal income tax, as reported by Cryptopolitan. 

The central bank and the Astana International Financial Centre also contributed to the order, which also proposed building the infrastructure to use stablecoins to settle cross-border trade. 

“Our goal is to make Kazakhstan a point of attraction for global capital and expertise while ensuring maximum transparency and protection for every participant in this market,” MAIDD Minister Zhaslan Madiyev said in the announcement.

How Kazakhstan is redirecting stranded gas to crypto mining 

US energy-and-computing firm, Crusoe, built its early business on turning waste gas into revenue after generations of it turning into flame via a process called flaring. 

Inefficient and responsible for roughly 1% of man-made atmospheric carbon dioxide, flaring was a necessity to dispose of the gas that oil wells vent into areas that pipelines often cannot reach.

Crusoe turned the strategy into mobile data center sites across the North Dakota and Montana shale fields. It also worked with producers such as Equinor, Devon Energy and Kraken Oil & Gas, according to the company in 2021. 

“Bitcoin mining is the best buyer of last resort,” Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller said, describing how it came up with the idea of turning stranded power into mining.

However, by 2025, Crusoe sold its Bitcoin mining and digital flare-mitigation operations to NYDIG, as it fully pivoted to AI infrastructure. 

Crusoe’s founders, whose company now operates a pipeline of more than 10 gigawatts of AI data center projects, wrote in a 2025 blog post: “What started with capturing waste methane in the oilfield to power Bitcoin mining has evolved into finding new and creative ways to power AI data centers.”

Will Kazakhstan also abandon Bitcoin mining for AI?

The pieces line up more neatly than the country may intend. The ministry steering the decree is literally named for artificial intelligence, the 70/30 rule bundles “data centers and digital miners” into one category of power buyer, and Kazakhstan already ranked among the top three countries by Bitcoin mining hash rate after China’s 2021 ban, per Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance data.

The “70/30” model would allow data centers and miners to tap up to 70% of new power capacity created by infrastructure upgrades.

The demand side is real too. Kazakhstan’s regulated crypto market has grown more than 30-fold in three years to top $10 billion, Cryptopolitan reported this month, and Binance has picked the country for a regional settlement hub. Stranded gas plus interruptible compute plus a government courting global capital is the recipe Crusoe rode from mining to AI.

So does Kazakhstan’s mining play become an AI compute playbook? The honest read is a qualified yes. 

Notably, nothing in the decree names AI training as the goal, and Kazakhstan’s grid has strained under miners before. But the infrastructure it is authorizing, off-grid power at the wellhead feeding container-scale compute, is exactly the on-ramp that turned one flare-gas Bitcoin operation into a multi-gigawatt AI builder. 

The question is less whether the path exists than whether Astana chooses to walk it.

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