On February 10, the Azerbaijan and the US governments signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, identifying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Infrastructure as one of the key pillars of future cooperation.

To better understand the long-term technological and regulatory implications of this partnership, we spoke with Etibar Aliyev, an AI expert with a background in computational analytics and informatics. Aliyev works on developing and optimizing large language models at Google and Meta, contributes technical expertise to the California AI Audit Bill and the International Association of Algorithmic Auditors (IAAA), and is a senior member of the IEEE. He is also the author of several peer-reviewed studies on AI applications in immersive environments, adaptive narratives, and social network algorithms.

Building a regional AI hub: Infrastructure, regulation, and the “model factory” concept

The Charter emphasizes expanding AI cooperation, including the development of AI data centers in Azerbaijan in collaboration with the private sector. Beyond symbolic cooperation, this signals a potential ambition: positioning Azerbaijan as a regional AI and digital infrastructure hub.

Q: The Strategic Partnership Charter highlights plans to expand AI cooperation and develop AI data centers in Azerbaijan in collaboration with the private sector. From your experience working on large language models at Google and Meta, what technical, regulatory, and infrastructure prerequisites are essential for Azerbaijan to become a competitive regional hub for AI data centers and advanced model development?

A: From the vantage point of building and stress-testing frontier-scale language models, the countries that become credible regional AI hubs usually get three layers right at the same time: dependable power, dependable networks, and dependable rules. On the infrastructure side, the non-negotiable is energy predictability - stable baseload, a realistic path to redundancy (N 1 at minimum for critical systems), and a power market structure that can support long-term contracts so operators can price capacity sensibly. The second is connectivity: multiple physically diverse fiber routes, low-latency peering, and clear cross-border transit agreements so training and inference traffic doesn’t bottleneck at the edge. The third is “datacenter-grade operations”: a local ecosystem of facilities engineers, SREs, hardware technicians, and vendors who can support high-density GPU clusters, liquid cooling, and rapid component turnaround without week-long import delays.

On the technical side, competitiveness today is less about owning “a big model” and more about building a reliable model factory. That means strong data engineering and governance, serious evaluation harnesses, and the ability to fine-tune and deploy models repeatedly with measurable improvements and known failure modes. It also means setting up secure compute enclaves for sensitive workloads (government, energy, telecom, defense-adjacent) so that not everything has to run in a single risk tier. Finally, for Azerbaijan specifically, the “space industry” angle is a strategic advantage if it’s translated into high-quality geospatial and remote-sensing........

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