Оксана Степура AI Eng 12 November 2026, 14:01

Kyivstar wants to become a leader in the field of AI in Ukraine. The company's president explained how he plans to achieve this

According to the president of Kyivstar, Oleksandr Komarov, the company aspires to become one of the leaders in the Ukrainian artificial intelligence market. To this end, the company is developing the Ukrainian language model "Siayvo", plans to create a data center for AI and expands its cloud business. Moreover, the operator is not going to postpone these projects until the end of the war.

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Kyivstar wants to become a leader in the field of AI in Ukraine. The company's president explained how he plans to achieve this

According to the president of Kyivstar, Oleksandr Komarov, the company aspires to become one of the leaders of the Ukrainian artificial intelligence market. To this end, the company is developing the Ukrainian language model "Siayvo", plans to create a data center for AI and expands its cloud business. Moreover, the operator is not going to postpone these projects until the end of the war.

This was stated by Kyivstar President Oleksandr Komarov during the presentation of financial results for the third quarter of 2026.

According to Komarov, the company already has an AI development plan, which consists of three areas.

The first is the Ukrainian language model “Siayvo”. Kyivstar is developing it together with the Ministry of Digital Economy. The team is currently moving from testing a version with 4 billion parameters to a much larger one with 26 billion. According to Komarov, the developers have already received the first Ukrainian data sets for working on the model. In the future, “Siayvo” should become the basis for AI services that the company wants to offer to users.

The second is its own capacity for AI. Komarov is convinced that Ukraine needs its own AI infrastructure, located as close as possible to users. To do this, Kyivstar wants to use existing data centers and its experience working with them. In June, the operator, its largest shareholder VEON and the Ministry of Economy signed a memorandum on the possible creation of a separate data center for AI in Ukraine.

The third is cloud services. At the end of October, Kyivstar signed an agreement to acquire Ukrainian provider GigaCloud. The deal could be worth up to $50 million. Komarov called the GigaCloud team the greatest value of this acquisition, rather than the company's infrastructure or client base. According to him, the experience of its engineers will help Kyivstar create its own AI services.

Komarov was also asked whether it was advisable to build expensive data centers in Ukraine during a war, when such infrastructure is under threat from Russian attacks.

In response, he cited the example of GigaCloud. One of the provider's key data centers has already been damaged by the war. However, according to Komarov, this did not affect the company's work, as some of the equipment was previously placed abroad, and the rest was distributed among several data centers in Ukraine.

The head of Kyivstar believes that future AI infrastructure can be protected in a similar way. He called his strategy “optimistic realism.”

In the future, Kyivstar wants to offer AI tools to ordinary subscribers as well. Kyivstar CEO Kaan Terzioglu suggested that over the next three years, such services could help, for example, teachers, farmers, and small business owners.

Earlier, dev.ua wrote that the Ukrainian language model "Syaivo" began to be tested in a closed mode. To evaluate the prototype and find its strengths and weaknesses, the project's specialized scientific committees were involved - linguistic, historical, technical, and ethical and legal.