Chinese artificial intelligence company iFlytek on 1 July 2026 formally opened the Central Asia station of its developer-facing Open Platform at a launch event held in Uzbekistan, marking the platform’s fourth overseas foothold and its first dedicated presence in the region. The event, staged under the theme “Let’s Spark Central Asia with AI,” drew several hundred participants from Central Asian governments, universities, enterprises, developers and media, according to the company’s post-event release.
Shenzhen-listed iFlytek (SZSE: 002230), headquartered in Hefei, is one of China’s largest players in speech recognition, natural-language processing and large-language-model applications, and has been on the US Entity List since 2019. Its Open Platform, launched domestically as China’s first cloud-based voice AI platform, has expanded steadily since it introduced an international portal in 2020. The company said that as of the Central Asia launch the platform makes 981 AI capabilities and packaged solutions available to developers, aggregates 11.46 million registered developers globally — of which more than 600,000 are based outside China — and reaches users in more than 220 countries and territories. It described the Central Asia rollout as its fourth overseas hub after earlier expansions into Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
At the Uzbekistan event, iFlytek unveiled more than ten localised AI solutions grouped around four use cases: office productivity, multilingual translation, smart spaces and enterprise intelligence. Featured products included OceanDoc, an AI document tool the company says supports fifteen languages including Russian and Uzbek and can generate drafts, layouts and slide decks from a single instruction; a large-format transparent translation screen designed for conferences and public-facing counters; GuideX, a digital-avatar receptionist for airports, government service halls and hotels; the WallEX smart-space controller; and Guide01, a humanoid guide robot. The platform said its stack — spanning its Spark foundation model, the Astron agent platform and its Xinghe MaaS (model-as-a-service) layer — has been tuned to support Russian, Uzbek and Kazakh alongside a wider set of regional languages, addressing what the company described as the multilingual reality of Central Asian public services, corporate offices and cross-border trade.
The launch was joined by Sherzod Shermatov, Uzbekistan’s Minister of Digital Technologies and the country’s National Chief Information Officer, who delivered the opening address. Yu Jidong, senior vice-president of iFlytek and president of the company’s Consumer Business Group, gave the welcome speech, and Zhou Chuanfu, vice-president of the Open Platform business group and general manager of overseas business, presented the platform’s Central Asia strategy. A launch ceremony was held together with Shermatov, Sheikh Mansoor Bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar and Qi Xiao, president of Huawei Cloud’s Middle East and Central Asia region. Shermatov, according to the company’s release, framed the arrival of the Central Asia station as a milestone for expanding cooperation and building a regional AI ecosystem, and pointed to Uzbekistan’s young population, growing IT sector and government backing for innovation as factors making the country a testbed for international technology partners. Yu, in his welcome remarks, said the station is intended to give Uzbek enterprises and developers unified access to iFlytek’s core AI stack and pledged continued investment in local talent training.
Uzbekistan is the most populous country in Central Asia, with around 37 million residents and a median age of about 27 in United Nations data cited by market-research firms. The country’s National AI Development Strategy, approved by presidential decree, sets a 2030 goal of positioning Uzbekistan as a regional AI innovation centre, and a follow-up decree issued in October 2025 by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev commits the government to launch at least 100 new AI-related projects across public administration, the economy and the social sector by end-2026 and to open fifteen new AI laboratories at universities. Kun.uz and government-affiliated publications have reported that the Ministry of Digital Technologies is coordinating the collection of Uzbek-language datasets to train a national language model, with the goal of ensuring the country’s cultural and linguistic identity is reflected in generative AI. Independent surveys still put Uzbek adoption of AI tools among the lowest in the region — a Microsoft study cited by regional media in mid-2026 ranked the country 142nd of 147 surveyed on regular AI usage — a gap that Chinese and Western vendors have both begun to target.
Alongside iFlytek’s own presentation, ecosystem partners took the stage to describe their planned collaboration. They included Nazarbayev University’s Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) in neighbouring Kazakhstan, which released the country’s KAZ-LLM open-source large language model in December 2024; Huawei Cloud; server and computing-infrastructure supplier Huakun Zhenyu; and Zhongguancun Kejin, a Beijing-based enterprise AI firm. The four partners said they would work with iFlytek on low-resource-language modelling, AI infrastructure and industry applications. iFlytek also announced that its Central Asia station immediately signed a first batch of strategic agreements with several local customers in the smart-home, advertising and marketing, financial services and intelligent-customer-service segments, though the names of the counterparties were not disclosed publicly. The company said it will also set up a Central Asia subsidiary and a dedicated local team to support the rollout.
The launch fits a broader push by Chinese AI vendors to widen their overseas footprint against a backdrop of US chip export controls and tightening access to Western enterprise markets. iFlytek reported in the third quarter of 2025 that its overseas revenue grew 2.7-fold year on year, driven initially by consumer hardware such as translation devices and AI note-taking tablets in Japan, South Korea, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and the company has since signalled that it wants to move further into government and enterprise deals. The Central Asia move also aligns with Beijing’s “Digital Silk Road” agenda, an offshoot of the Belt and Road Initiative that emphasises technology and telecommunications cooperation with partner countries, though iFlytek’s own materials framed the Uzbek launch primarily in commercial and developer-ecosystem terms rather than as a state-directed initiative.
For Central Asian governments and businesses, the arrival of a large China-based AI platform provider adds another option to a market where regional universities, telecom operators and start-ups have been building homegrown language models and where global cloud vendors already offer AI tooling. Whether iFlytek’s platform gains meaningful traction is likely to depend on how quickly its Russian-, Uzbek- and Kazakh-language models are refined against local benchmarks, and on how the company navigates data-localisation rules that Uzbekistan and its neighbours have been tightening as they build out national AI strategies.
