Officials laid the foundation stone on 9 June for IT Hub Dushanbe in the capital’s Ismoili Somoni district, described as Tajikistan’s largest digital-technology and innovation project. The complex is to include an IT school, an IT park, an information-technology business centre and a Regional Artificial Intelligence Centre, according to the office of Rustam Emomali, who chairs the National Assembly and serves as mayor of Dushanbe.
The groundbreaking follows the April opening of Dushanbe’s first IT park and fits Tajikistan’s wider AI ambitions. The country adopted an AI strategy through 2040 back in 2022, the first in the region, and has pressed at the United Nations to host a centre coordinating artificial-intelligence work across Central Asia. The new regional AI centre is meant to anchor that bid.
The hub is fronted by Rustam Emomali, the president’s son and the man widely expected to succeed him.
The ambition sits against hard limits. Tajikistan is the region’s poorest economy, depends heavily on remittances from Russia, and faces chronic winter electricity shortages; it recently raised power and heating tariffs to cover an energy-sector deficit. An AI centre presumes a reliable grid the country is still building.