inDrive, Pony.ai, and Nvidia Corp. signed a memorandum of understanding on October 22, 2026 to explore bringing Pony.ai's robotaxis to inDrive's ride-hailing platform in Kazakhstan2,8. Testing is targeted for the first half of 2027 in Astana, inDrive CTO Yuri Misnik told TechCrunch, with a safety operator on board at launch and fully driverless rides as the eventual goal. The robotaxi partnership sits inside a broader Nvidia Corp. push into Kazakhstan's AI infrastructure, detailed in an October 22, 2026 post by Nvidia Corp. Vice President Rev Lebaredian at GTC Berlin14.
Robotaxi stack and operations
Pony.ai would provide its Gen-7 robotaxis, while inDrive would list rides in its app and run the service on the ground9. Nvidia Corp. would supply the AI technology, including its Hyperion platform and Halos safety system. The partners plan to assess the technical, operational, regulatory, and commercial feasibility of offering Level 4 autonomous ride-hailing through the inDrive app, with the service launching only after an agreement with Kazakhstan's government13.
Pony.ai said it developed an upgraded Level 4 autonomous-driving domain controller in collaboration with Nvidia Corp., built on the Drive Hyperion platform and powered by Drive AGX Thor with NVLink. The company said the platform can link two Drive Thor chips for a combined maximum computing performance of 4,000 FP4 TFLOPS. Pony.ai said it has partnered with Nvidia Corp. since 2017, launching proprietary automotive-grade computing units powered by DRIVE Orin chips in 2022 and scaling in 2025 to what it described as the world's first Level 4 domain controller featuring four DRIVE Orin X chips for its mass-produced seventh-generation robotaxi.
inDrive, founded in Kazakhstan in 2013, says its platform has facilitated more than 8 billion transactions and is active in roughly 48 countries and more than 1,200 cities. Sensor Tower has ranked it the world's second most downloaded ride-hailing app for four years running, according to inDrive.
Kazakhstan's GPU buildout
JSC Kazakhtelecom, described by Nvidia Corp. as Kazakhstan's largest telecommunications company, has deployed 400 H200 and 480 B300 GPUs in Astana and Almaty. The company plans to deploy more than 1,000 additional GPUs at each of two further sites next year: more than 1,000 GPUs in Data Center Valley and more than 1,000 Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region. Lebaredian's post framed the deployments as evidence that Kazakhstan's AI ecosystem is moving from infrastructure planning to active deployment across what Nvidia Corp. describes as the full AI stack.
JSC Kazakhtelecom announced Central Asia's first commercial sovereign AI factory on May 29, 2025, powered by H200 GPUs with an estimated total performance of 56.4 petaflops at FP16. The sovereign AI factory is intended to be delivered as a cloud service to government institutions, private businesses, startups, and universities.
Wider deal context
On June 15, 2026, Kazakhstan Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov met Lebaredian and Firebird co-founders Razmig Hovaghimian and Alexander Yesayan. Agreements on AI and digital infrastructure cooperation totaling $10 billion were signed following that meeting. Zhaslan Madiyev reportedly estimated the project would generate at least $3 billion in annual export revenue and said the planned $10 billion investment would enable Kazakhstan to establish a large-scale computing cluster powered by 100,000 GPU chips, including GB300 and Vera Rubin. Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz was described as having 300 MW of power capacity already available, with a design allowing phased expansion to 1 GW.
The deal adds to Pony.ai's international push: earlier in October 2026, Uber announced plans to test Pony.ai's robotaxis in London, where Uber has also started offering supervised autonomous rides with British startup Wayve12. ANALYSIS The MOU extends Pony.ai's geographic reach into Central Asia while giving inDrive a path to autonomous rides on its home-market platform. The announcements arrived during GTC Berlin, where Nvidia Corp. also disclosed prefab data-center partnerships and robotics deals[2][3].