Ukraine commits to hosting and maintaining its AI servers on domestic soil
Ukrainian government is in talks with private companies and seeking partnerships to secure the future national language model infrastructure, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov told NV Business on Aug. 13.
His statement comes after the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Kyivstar agreed to develop a national language model (LLM) in June. The company said the ministry will coordinate the development process and shape the technological and ethical vision for creating the LLM, including forming a coordination committee and ethical and technical boards.
Bornyakov detailed who will ensure the project’s long-term technical support, and where the servers will be located.
"The main cost of creating and maintaining a national language model is infrastructure," Deputy Minister explained.
"This includes purchasing graphics processing units (GPUs), maintaining data centers, servers, and so on. When we use an AI product based on an LLM, every request costs money. We pay for two components — for the work of the model itself and for the computing power it runs on.”
Users — state agencies, businesses, and other communities — will be able to access the LLM itself free of charge. But to launch products, “they will need to take care of the infrastructure the model will run on,” Digital Transformation Ministry warned.
The infrastructure serving the language model and supporting it for government products will be located in Ukraine — a matter of principle linked to national security concerns.
In the initial stage, funding may come from partners or donors. This approach is familiar to the ministry: they launch a project together with a partner, it enters production, and users (state agencies or citizens) begin using it actively. After that, the donor hands over the infrastructure to the state, and the government puts it on its balance sheet, since the service becomes critical for state operations.
Today, there are many language models on the market, but the actual number of products that systematically solve applied problems remains limited.
Ukraine plans to create a practical example of implementation — a model that will become part of the state’s digital infrastructure and solve specific functional tasks.
The ministry hopes this will interest businesses and encourage them to form partnerships.
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