Yelnar Salpekov recently graduated from school. The Nazarbayev Intellectual School graduate is now studying at one of the world's most prestigious universities — the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Alongside his studies, he is developing his own startup. Recently, together with his team, he brought to Kazakhstan a $10 billion project aimed at building a modern artificial intelligence data center in the Pavlodar region. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Sputnik Kazakhstan.
"Nothing is Impossible"
Yelnar realized during school that nothing is impossible. All it takes is sincere hard work. "At that time I was 12-13 years old. My friend and I made fruit chips and sold them at school. Later we thought about turning this into a business. My friend accidentally went to an investor - a restaurant owner - and told him about our idea. I was surprised that the entrepreneur agreed to listen to us. We prepared a business plan and presented the project. As a result, he agreed to invest $60,000 in us," Salpekov recalled.
According to him, the main work of the company was done by adults. Although the first business did not last long, it was this experience that radically changed his outlook on life. "I realized that nothing is impossible in life. Since then, I have been constantly looking for new opportunities and new projects," he says.
How He Got into Berkeley
Yelnar Salpekov was the first to win a medal at the International History Olympiad (IHO). He helped students from rural schools get into Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools and, together with his team, organized internships for thousands of children. At that time, he also decided to participate in the Study With Us educational program, created by the U.S. State Department together with Laura Vaygorova. Within this program, gifted school students are prepared for admission to foreign universities for free.
Yelnar was also helped by the Smartest Prep center. Thus, a graduate with 1500 points on the SAT and 8.0 on IELTS was admitted to the Berkeley campus of the University of California. His tuition is fully paid by the Rise fund, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
What Is His Personal Project
Alongside his studies, Yelnar, together with his friend Askar Almukhametov, launched the Q App startup, which simplifies the process of admission to Kazakhstani universities. Today, this online platform is used by more than 70 higher education institutions in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. More than $200,000 in investments have been attracted to the project.
"We are creating a platform for online submission of documents to Kazakhstani universities. Currently, many applicants stand in queues and submit documents in person. A person can fill out an application once and send documents to several universities at once," he says.
$10 Billion Attracted to Kazakhstan
Attracting one of the world's largest projects in the field of artificial intelligence to Kazakhstan became the most ambitious project in Yelnar's life. While studying at Berkeley, his partner Askar Almukhametov met Razmik Ovakimyan, the founder of Firebird, an official partner of NVIDIA. This company builds modern data centers for artificial intelligence. The centers process requests from AI systems such as ChatGPT.
The company implemented its first such project in Armenia for $4 billion. The next facility was planned to be built in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, or Tunisia. "Razmik contacted us. We convinced them to come to Kazakhstan, showed the country's capabilities, helped organize meetings with representatives of government agencies. As a result, they abandoned other options and chose Kazakhstan," he concluded.