Nico Caprez, Vice President for Global AI Infrastructure Growth at NVIDIA, and co-founders of Firebird.AI visited Nazarbayev University, where they met with students and university leadership, held discussions with Minister of Science and Higher Education Sayasat Nurbek, and addressed finalists of the DeepTech Bäige startup competition.
During the visit, the delegation was introduced to the university’s research infrastructure and key strategic initiatives, including the launch of the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (SСAI), focused on advancing mathematical sciences and AI. Provost Rehan Sadiq said the university aims to deepen industry collaboration through ISSAI’s products and further strengthen its focus on innovation as part of Kazakhstan’s emerging digital economy.
Minister Nurbek emphasized the university’s role as one of the region’s leading research institutions and underscored the importance of building an ecosystem closely integrated with industry.
“NU is Kazakhstan’s flagship research- intensive university with really good fundamental research, and now our goal is to deliver real impact—on industry, society and economic growth. We are moving from good to great by focusing on multidisciplinary research and bringing together top talent to create real-time impact through applied projects,” he said.
Mr. Caprez welcomed the NU’s initiative to join the NVIDIA DLI University Ambassador Program and highlighted the potential for collaboration.
“Our company would like to not only do research, but productize it, it’s really important for us. So I’m sure there’s some partnership here that we can explore too, and generally the conditions that you create here, for the students, but also for companies such as NVIDIA, to come and make an impact here is fantastic to see. NVIDIA has 45,000 employees today, and we’re growing every day. We’ve seen great students here, so we’d love to give them the opportunity to join us as well, so just encourage them to apply to NVIDIA,” he said.
The parties also discussed potential cooperation, including the possible opening of a company office within the university’s planned research park and future data center, where NVIDIA’s expertise, particularly in high-demand GPU infrastructure, could play a key role.
The visit concluded with a meeting between the NVIDIA delegation and finalists of the DeepTech Bäige competition at the NU Onergy Creative Hub. The final cohort featured 11 promising deep tech student projects spanning agri-tech, mining, energy management and EV charging, drug discovery, biomedical screening and oncology, as well as autonomous drones, robotics and aerospace technologies.
