Central Asia faces a combined investment requirement of more than $250 billion across its energy, transport, water and logistics sectors by the end of the decade, a senior official at the Eurasian Development Bank said Friday.
Speaking at an EDB business forum in Almaty, Deputy Chairman Ruslan Dalenov put the energy sector’s financing needs alone at $170 billion, with a further $60 billion required for transport infrastructure, $14 billion for water, and $7 billion for logistics — bringing the aggregate figure to $251 billion.
Dalenov framed the scale of need not as a burden but as an opening, reports Interfax.
The gaps in current infrastructure represent investment opportunities, he said, and the bank is already tracking a subsequent wave of capital-intensive sectors including energy storage, artificial intelligence, space technology and climate adaptation.
The EDB official also pushed back against any lingering perception of Central Asia as purely a resource extraction destination, describing the region instead as one increasingly defined by industrial capacity, innovation and long-term growth potential.
To meet the investment volumes required, Dalenov called for deeper co-financing arrangements, inviting international financial institutions, investment banks and commercial investors to pool capital alongside the bank and its member states. /// nCa, 29 June 2026