Kazakhstan's flared-gas decree fits bitcoin miners better than AI builders

The condition attached to this power decides who buys it. Producers may redirect the gas only when it is not needed for state purposes ^[2], so the buyer at the wellhead is taking electricity the government can take back. Flaring exists to get rid of gas in places pipelines often cannot reach ^[6]. Crusoe's chief executive, Chase Lochmiller, explained what first drew his company to that gas. "Bitcoin mining is the best buyer of last resort," he said ^[13].

The Crusoe precedent is narrower than the comparison suggests. The company built mobile data center sites across the North Dakota and Montana shale fields and worked with producers including Equinor, Devon Energy and Kraken Oil & Gas ^[9]. "What started with capturing waste methane in the oilfield to power Bitcoin mining has evolved into finding new and creative ways to power AI data centers," its founders wrote in 2025 ^[12]. That evolution included the NYDIG sale ^[10]. The AI business Crusoe kept has a pipeline of more than 10 gigawatts of data center projects ^[11].

The opening for AI in Kazakhstan is in a different rule. Under the country's 70/30 model, data centers and miners, counted as one category of buyer, may take up to 70% of new power capacity created by infrastructure upgrades ^[14]. At least 30% stays with other users ^[16]. That capacity comes from upgrading the grid, which is a separate supply from gas at the wellhead. The report does not give a volume of flared gas or a megawatt figure for what producers could generate.

The demand the report cites is crypto demand. It puts the regulated crypto market's growth at more than 30-fold in three years, to over $10 billion ^[15]. Taken at those floors, the market started near $333 million ^[17]. Binance has picked the country for a regional settlement hub ^[19], and the decree proposes exempting regulated crypto income from personal income tax ^[7]. "Our goal is to make Kazakhstan a point of attraction for global capital and expertise while ensuring maximum transparency and protection for every participant in this market," Zhaslan Madiyev, who heads the ministry, said ^[8].

This can go a few ways. In the first, producers sign miners at the wellhead while AI builders compete with those same miners for the 70% on the upgraded grid ^[14]. In the second, a local operator follows Crusoe's sequence: it learns on flare gas, then sells the wellhead units to a bitcoin company ^[10]. In the third, the state reclaims the gas for its own purposes often enough that no buyer of either kind commits ^[2].

I think the first is the likeliest. The decree builds a bitcoin mining business at the wellhead, and AI compute, if it comes, arrives on the grid. Cryptopolitan answers the AI question with "a qualified yes" ^[18], citing a decree steered by a ministry named for artificial intelligence ^[3] and a rule that bundles data centers with miners ^[14]. The same report notes that nothing in the decree names AI training as the goal, and that Kazakhstan's grid has strained under miners before ^[5]. I would be wrong if the first contracts under the decree put a data center operator at a flare site.