By Anatoly Motkin

In late April 2026, Tencent - the Chinese technology conglomerate behind WeChat - completed the acquisition of a 3.2 percent stake in Kaspi.kz, Kazakhstan's dominant super app, at approximately US$ 518 million. Just months earlier, Tencent led a financing round in Uzum, Uzbekistan's first tech unicorn, lifting the startup's valuation to US$ 1.5 billion and opening the door for the Chinese giant to enter Central Asia's digital economy. Taken together, these two moves constitute something far more consequential than routine investment decisions. They represent the arrival of Chinese digital power at the heart of post-Soviet Eurasia and Washington has yet to formulate a coherent response.

 Photo by Pixels Hunter, 2020

BACKGROUND:

Kaspi.kz is not a typical fintech startup. In Kazakhstan, it operates as a powerful super app that integrates payments, e-commerce, and consumer services into a single platform, commanding roughly 75 percent of digital payments and nearly 89 percent of e-commerce activity in its home market. Critically, the platform seamlessly integrates payments, online commerce, fintech services, travel, classifieds, and access to government services,  meaning it is directly plugged into state administrative databases. Similarly, Uzum in Uzbekistan combines e-commerce with fintech and banking services, touching millions of citizens’ financial and transactional lives daily.

The strategic logic of Tencent's acquisitions is straightforward. The investments align with strengthening economic ties between China and Kazakhstan, where Chinese investors are already backing 224 industrial projects valued at an estimated US$ 66.4 billion. But the digital dimension of this relationship is qualitatively different from physical infrastructure. When a company like Tencent acquires a meaningful stake in platforms that mediate the daily financial, commercial, and civic transactions of tens of millions of people, it gains something invaluable: structured, real-time access to population-scale behavioral data.

This is not an abstract concern. China has developed a data governance architecture predicated on domestic security, in which the party-state enjoys extensive data access power over domestic big tech companies. Under China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017, any Chinese organization or citizen must support, cooperate with, and collaborate in national intelligence work. There is no meaningful legal firewall between a Tencent minority stake in a Central Asian super apps and the Chinese state’s appetite for foreign data.

Large datasets about local populations can be transferred to China under conditions where weak local regulation provides little protection. The cautionary tale is well documented: Huawei’s provision of digital infrastructure for the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa was later found to have been transferring server contents to Shanghai every day for five years. Central Asian governments should study this precedent carefully.

Tencent’s fintech plays are only the most visible thread of a much broader Chinese digital expansion across the region. Huawei has been deeply embedded in Central Asian telecommunications networks for over a decade, building 4G and 5G backbone infrastructure across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The company is scaling its open source platforms OpenHarmony and openEuler to accelerate what it calls ”digital sovereignty” across Central Asia, deploying the language of sovereignty while consolidating its own architectural control over the region’s digital nervous system. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud has established data center operations in the region, and Chinese e-commerce platforms increasingly intermediate cross-border trade flows between China and its Central Asian neighbors under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Beijing’s Digital Silk Road initiative promotes the development of transnational network infrastructure and aims to enhance information connectivity across BRI countries - and Central Asia sits squarely at the geographic core of this project. Chinese technologies increasingly mediate social, political, and economic activities in recipient countries, creating layered dependencies that are difficult to unwind once established.

IMPLICATIONS:

The data sovereignty implications are severe. Super apps connected to government service portals do not merely capture consumer preferences, they capture identity verification records, tax filings, property registrations, healthcare interactions, and travel histories. For an intelligence service, this is not commercial data. It is a population census updated in real time.

Central Asian governments have begun to sense the risk. Kazakhstan has enacted data localization requirements. Uzbekistan has been strengthening its cybersecurity regulatory framework. But regulatory intent and enforcement capacity are very different things, particularly when the investment relationship itself creates structural dependencies and political incentives for governments to look the other way.

What can the U.S. offer as an alternative? The answer lies not in prohibition, Washington cannot tell sovereign governments whom to accept investment from, but in competition and capacity-building. Three lines of effort are essential.

First, the U.S. and its partners should actively promote alternatives in the fintech and digital infrastructure space. American and European venture capital has largely ignored Central Asia. The region’s digital markets are growing rapidly, and the vacuum left by Western investors is being filled by Chinese capital on terms that suit Beijing’s strategic interests. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), established during President Trump’s first term and granted expanded authorities in 2025, and its European counterparts should prioritize co-investment in Central Asian digital platforms, with data governance conditions attached.

Second, Washington should expand the Pax Silica framework, the emerging U.S.-led digital technology alliance, to explicitly address data security standards for countries in the region. Establishing clear criteria for trusted digital investment, analogous to the Clean Network initiative for 5G but adapted for the fintech and super app era, would give Central Asian governments a positive framework to reference when evaluating foreign stakes in systemically important digital platforms.

Third, the U.S. government should invest in building Central Asian regulatory capacity on data governance, cybersecurity auditing, and foreign investment screening in the digital sector. Technical assistance programs through the State Department’s Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership and bilateral cooperation agreements can help governments develop the institutional tools to assess the risks embedded in transactions like Tencent's acquisition of Kaspi.kz - before the deal is done, not after.

CONCLUSIONS:

China’s digital expansion into Central Asia is not accidental. It is a deliberate, coordinated strategy executed through commercially rational transactions that each, individually, appear benign. The Tencent–Kaspi deal will be reported as a fintech investment. The Uzum funding will be celebrated as a startup success story. But viewed in aggregate and in strategic context, they represent the systematic acquisition of data leverage over populations that sit at the intersection of China’s continental ambitions and America’s competitive blind spot. Washington needs to start paying attention, and start competing, before the architecture of Central Asia’s digital future is set in Beijing.

AUTHOR’S BIO: 

Anatoly Motkin is President of StrategEast Center for a New Economy, a leading independent institution advancing digital economy in developing countries, in collaboration with international financial institutions, development agencies, global tech companies, and governments.