EditEurope wants Kazakhstan’s minerals. It should want its minds too
What Kazakhstan is asking for is concrete, and it has a name: association to Horizon Europe and its successor framework
The EU’s €12 billion Global Gateway bet on Central Asia stops at raw materials, transport and energy. The missing pillar is research – and Kazakhstan is ready to be a partner, not a quarry, writes Sayasat Nurbek.
Sayasat Nurbek is Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan since 2022.
Brussels has decided that Central Asia matters. The first EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand last year, the €12 billion Global Gateway package, the declaration of intent on critical raw materials, the push to make the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor a serious alternative to Russian routes – together they mark the most ambitious European opening to the region in a generation.
As a Kazakh minister, I welcome this. But I want to point to something the current strategy leaves out.
Look at how the €12 billion is allocated: transport corridors, critical raw materials, water and energy, digital connectivity. Every euro is directed at what can be extracted from Central Asia or moved across it. Not one is directed at what can be created with it. The EU is building a sophisticated partnership with Kazakhstan that, so far, treats my country as a deposit and a transit route — not as a place where knowledge is produced.
That is a strategic blind spot, and closing it is in Europe’s own interest.
Consider the logic the Commission itself uses on raw materials. Olivier Doens of DG INTPA put it bluntly in Brussels this month: it is not enough to secure access to mines while others dominate refining, processing and technology. “Power,” he said, “will rest in the hands of those that control extraction, refining, processing, transport standards, financing, and ultimately industrial capacity.” He is right. But that logic does not stop at metallurgy. The same is true of knowledge. A partnership that imports Kazakh lithium while ignoring Kazakh laboratories repeats, in the research domain, exactly the dependency trap the EU says it wants to escape.
So let me set out what Kazakhstan actually brings to the table — because it is more than Brussels currently assumes.
Over the past three years we have rebuilt the institutional plumbing of our research system. A new Law on Science and Technological Policy. Technology Readiness Levels as the standard for evaluating research. Digitalised, competitive research funding. Expanded open science. We have committed, by law, to raising R&D spending to 1% of GDP by 2029, with private co-financing built in. These are not press releases; they are the unglamorous institutional conditions that make a country eligible to be a serious research partner rather than an aid recipient.
The human capital is there too. Nearly half of Kazakhstan’s researchers are under 40 – a demographic profile most EU research systems can only envy – and the share of women in our scientific workforce is strong and rising.
We have also voted with our institutions. Roughly 40 partnerships with foreign universities now operate on Kazakh soil. Cardiff – the first Russell Group university to open a campus in Central Asia – is in Astana. Heriot-Watt, Coventry, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Arizona; and from within the Union itself, Université de Lorraine, Grenoble INP–Phelma, Politecnica delle Marche, and German partners including Anhalt University, Hochschule Hof and Hochschule Mittweida. European universities are not observing Kazakhstan from a distance. They are already operating here.
Then there is artificial intelligence, where the gap between perception and reality is widest. Kazakhstan’s national supercomputer, Alem.cloud, runs on NVIDIA H200 GPUs and ranks among the most powerful systems in the world – the largest computing cluster in Central Asia by a wide margin. On it we have trained a national large language model, rolled out AI training to hundreds of thousands of university students, and signed one of the world’s largest sovereign ChatGPT Edu agreements. This is sovereign compute of a kind most EU member states do not possess. It is precisely the sort of capacity Europe needs more of on its periphery, not less.
Here is why this should matter to Brussels specifically. The EU’s own priorities – the green transition, critical raw materials, water security in a drying continent, climate adaptation, AI, life sciences – are Kazakhstan’s active research fields. We are not proposing cooperation on subjects Europe finds peripheral. We are working on the same problems, from a geography that gives us data and field conditions Europe cannot reproduce: the Caspian, the steppe, the glaciers of the Tien Shan, one of the planet’s most consequential zones of water stress and energy transition.
And Kazakhstan has done multilateral science before. The International Science and Technology Center, headquartered in Astana, has managed cross-border research for years under exactly the governance, transparency and accountability standards Horizon Europe demands. That operational track record is rarer among aspiring partners than Brussels tends to assume.
What we are asking for is concrete, and it has a name. Association to Horizon Europe and its successor framework – the same structured route through which the Union already partners with the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Two-way researcher mobility. Shared access to research infrastructure. Technology-transfer mechanisms that actually function. A seat in joint agenda-setting, not merely a slot in someone else’s call for proposals.
This would also make the rest of the EU’s Central Asia strategy work better. A minerals partnership with no research dimension produces extraction. A minerals partnership coupled with joint R&D produces refining capacity, local value chains, and the skilled people to run them – the “industrial capacity” the Commission says it wants on its side of the ledger. Research association is not a soft add-on to the Global Gateway. It is what turns a supply deal into a development partnership.
Kazakhstan is not approaching Brussels as a supplicant. We are approaching it as a country with genuine research capacity, a young scientific community, regional knowledge Europe lacks, and a demonstrated commitment to the institutional standards that make cooperation real.
Europe has decided that Central Asia is, in von der Leyen’s phrase, “the beating heart of Eurasia.” The question is whether the EU’s research policy will catch up with its geopolitics – or whether it will keep treating one of its most willing partners as a resource to be secured, rather than a mind to be engaged.
Caption: The Minister of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan Saysat Nurbek opens the branch of the Università Politecnica delle Marche (from Ancona, Italy), Kazakhstan, on 17 July 2025. [Photo courtesy of Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan]
Updated: June 1, 2026 - 06:24
