Monday 29 June, 2026
GSMA Members Freedom Telecom International and Nokia inaugurated a joint Silicon Valley Innovation Centre near Nokia’s Sunnyvale campus, a collaborative space, between the two companies, focused on next-generation digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, cloud technologies, advanced connectivity, and telecom-fintech convergence.
The centre will operate as testing ground for the joint initiatives of Freedom Holding Corp., Freedom Telecom International, Freedom Lifestyle Group, and Nokia: a place where teams can jointly experiment, build, test, evaluate, and demonstrate digital solutions created for direct application in FRHC’s operational footprint.
The collaboration combines Nokia’s expertise in networks, cloud, edge computing, and AI-ready infrastructure with Freedom Holding Corp.’s expanding ecosystem in finance, banking, insurance, telecom, payments, e-commerce, and lifestyle services. The parties are determined to discover and develop the most promising next-generation digital infrastructure solutions. Early focus will be on AI data centre blueprints, cloud infrastructure and advanced networking, 5G and edge use cases, enabling AI-powered consumer services.
By being located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the centre will bring together:
- Nokia’s infrastructure, engineering expertise, global innovation network, and technology testbeds;
- Freedom’s ecosystem, market access, investment capabilities, and experience scaling digital financial and lifestyle services;
- Silicon Valley’s unique energy: the closeness of all technology partners, world-class entrepreneurs and world-class tech talent.
This initiative is connected to Kazakhstan’s broader ambition to become the Central Asian hub for artificial intelligence with own, sovereign cloud infrastructure and next-generation compute capabilities. Earlier this year, Freedom Holding Corp., together with the Government of Kazakhstan and NVIDIA, announced plans for the construction of a 100 MW Sovereign AI Hub, intended to support national AI models, research and development, AI academies, and new technology labs.
During the opening ceremony, Timur Turlov, CEO of Freedom Holding Corp. said “Financial services represent a tremendous global opportunity due to their inefficiencies. Too much time, effort, and human capital are spent on processes that can already be automated. We have proven that it is possible to approve a mortgage within hours, and this encourages us to completely rethink the role of traditional structures. AI opens our horizon and allows us to tackle complex processes which can be redesigned and assisted through its capabilities. I trust our partner, Nokia that together we can move our ideas to real, scalable solutions for the benefit of our ecosystem.”
Mikko Lavanti from Nokia commented “This partnership is about delivering tangible value together. At Nokia, we bring deep expertise in designing and deploying high-performance AI infrastructure at scale, backed by a strong track record of innovation. We are proud to support Freedom in launching state-of-the-art consumers applications across its markets, helping accelerate its AI ambitions with resilient and future-ready infrastructure.”
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