The former resting place for camel caravans has now become a data hub. The fiber optic cables laid by Chinese enterprises penetrate the remaining veins of the Tianshan Mountains, and the code along the coast of the Aral Sea begins to resonate with the East Asian cloud. This land, which once relied on oases to connect the east and west, is now using the digital Silk Road to reconstruct its geographical advantages and turn computing power into a new oasis currency.

Looking back on 2026, Uzbekistan will take the digital economy as the core driving force for development, relying on the presidential decree and the "Digital Uzbekistan 2030" to complete the top-level layout. Local mobile broadband and 5G achieve large-scale coverage, relying on the Digital Silk Road, and Chinese enterprises such as Huawei and ZTE use technology to assist local digital transformation.

Digital infrastructure is being fully deployed across the entire region

In 2024, the mobile broadband coverage rate in the dense region of Uzbekistan will be 99%, and all states will have access to 5G. The international bandwidth will be 4200Gbps. The scale of Internet and mobile phone users will be considerable. ICT will attract 870 million dollars. The country has launched a high-speed fiber optic network project, and Huawei's eastern fiber optic cable project has completed 80%, with the goal of achieving full fiber coverage by 2025; The commercial 5G SA network built by ZTE has a network speed of 1.2Gbps. KT from South Korea invested 300 million US dollars to undertake the Tashkent Smart City AI Transportation Project.

The digital industry is accelerating its rise

The digital technology department of Ukraine plans to coordinate the transformation, with ICT revenue of 4.44 billion US dollars and IT exports of 620 million US dollars by 2024. Electronic payments will be popularized, and it is planned to have IT exports of 5 billion US dollars and e-government ranking among the top 30 in the world by 2030. The data for the second quarter of 2024 shows a year-on-year increase of 47% in the cloud market, with an increase in the scale of local fintech users, Huawei Cloud landing on local computing power nodes, and industry funds supporting blockchain and IoT startups.

The "Digital Uzbekistan 2030" specifies quantitative indicators such as fiber optic, internet speed, programming talent, and AI output value, and requires a 1.5-fold increase in the scale of the digital economy by 2026. The implementation of the "AI Development Strategy 2030" has achieved significant results, with tax and banking AI systems reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The million programmer training plan has been exceeded, and some talents have entered Huawei Central Asia Research Institute. Multiple digital economy policies have been issued locally, and special funds have been set up to support electronic authentication and industry AI. The new version of the Electronic Transactions Law has established the legal status of NFTs, opened up cross-border data whitelists and financial technology regulatory sandboxes. Keywords: Uzbekistan, digital economy, 5G

China and Ukraine join hands on the Digital Silk Road

Huawei and ZTE are deeply involved in local communication and government infrastructure. In 2022, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding on digital economy cooperation, and smart transportation and communication transformation projects have been implemented. Subsequently, they will expand cooperation in AI and cloud computing. In existing projects, Huawei's intelligent logistics system improves freight efficiency by 40%, and ZTE's government platform integrates 87% of government data. In 2025, both sides will promote three major cooperation directions: quantum communication experimental network, digital twin oil field, and cross-border e-commerce payment.Editor/Gong Ziwei