As a pathway for digital connectivity, the Middle Corridor shares the same goal as regional trade and transport connectivity: to circumvent Russia.

For years, Washington and Brussels have promoted the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (also known as the Middle Corridor)—the east-west trade route connecting China and Central Asia to Europe through the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey—as an alternative to moving goods through Russia. This strategic route gained urgency after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions that followed. Fiber-optic cables represent the Middle Corridor’s digital layer and are as vital as pipelines for modern economic activity. 

The leaders of Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian states are fully aware of this. On August 5, a submarine cable laid from Sumgait, Azerbaijan, reached the Kazakh coast, completing the seabed stage of the Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic Cable. Commercial service is expected to come online by the end of 2026. The 380-kilometer (236-mile) link, a joint venture between Kazakhtelecom and AzerTelecom, may be modest by global submarine-cable standards, but its significance is hard to overstate. It opens the first high-capacity data path from Central Asia to Europe that avoids Russian territory. 

The vulnerability it addresses is real. Roughly 95 percent of Kazakhstan’s international internet traffic transits Russian networks. Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan reach the outside world largely by routing first through Kazakhstan and then Russia. Thus, an entire region’s external connectivity passes through a jurisdiction where security services hold statutory access to traffic on domestic networks, and a political rupture could interrupt service to the entire area. 

A second digital artery is also taking shape. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) emerged from the peace framework Azerbaijan and Armenia signed at the White House in August 2025. It runs across Armenia, linking mainland Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave and onward to Turkey. The TRIPP Development Company, in which the United States holds a 74-percent stake, manages the route under a 49-year lease. Its digital component is already commercially anchored. In June, Telecom Armenia and AzerTelecom signed a reciprocal transit agreement, opening the way for a fiber-optic link to Nakhchivan through Armenia.

These projects will also support the region’s effort to build artificial intelligence capacity. Three years ago, Central Asia and the South Caucasus lacked the powerful computer chips essential to run AI. Today, Kazakhstan operates two supercomputers built on Nvidia H200 hardware; Azerbaijan brought its own Nvidia-based supercomputer center online in December 2025; and Tajikistan paired a GPU cluster with its hydropower potential in a mountainous Darvoz region.

American firms and hardware are leading that buildout. Nvidia is the region’s primary supplier of advanced accelerators. US AI cloud company Firebird opened the region’s largest AI factory in Armenia in July 2026, with plans to scale to 70,000 GPUs and 300 MW capacity by the end of 2027. Firebird has also signed a $10 billion agreement with Kazakhstan’s Data Center Valley, with two 125 MW phases targeted for 2027. 

Azerbaijan has become a central node in the transit and digital corridors that carry the region’s demand for American technology. Unlike its neighbors, it also has the energy capacity to power its AI ambitions and could eventually power Armenia’s. In June, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told the National Assembly that Armenia no longer maintains an electricity surplus. Realizing Firebird’s full-scale potential will require new generation and storage capacity. 

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan exports its gas-fired energy surplus, develops solar and wind capacity in the green energy zones of Karabakh and East Zangezur, and builds a Black Sea cable to sell electricity to Europe. In an industry where power availability is the binding constraint, this is not just a marginal advantage.

Against this backdrop, two legislative relics hinder American engagement in this promising market. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment, enacted in 1974 to pressure the Soviet Union over Jewish emigration, still anachronistically applies to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Both are certified compliant, yet neither holds Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. Normal treatment requires an annual presidential waiver. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called the provision “a detriment” that the administration wants removed.  

Even more consequential is Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act. Written at the height of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, it restricts direct US assistance to the Azerbaijani government without presidential waiver. While every president since George W. Bush has issued that waiver, it lapsed once, under the Biden administration, and Baku treated the interruption as a diplomatic rupture. The provision now coexists awkwardly with the Strategic Partnership Charter that Washington and Baku signed in February 2026, which lists connectivity, energy, artificial intelligence, and defense as shared priorities. 

Three decades of annual renewals have made Section 907 a perennial source of friction in  US-Azerbaijan relations. Full repeal would align US legislative reality with the Strategic Partnership Charter and send a clear message that America is ready to treat Azerbaijan as a long-term partner. The status quo is undermining the planning horizon. Data centers, transmission upgrades, and subsea infrastructure are financed over 15- to 20-year timelines. A legal framework renewed annually at the president’s discretion, and periodically contested in Congress, is a poor foundation for that kind of capital investment—particularly in sectors where competition with China is close to zero-sum.  

Chinese and Western vendors can easily coexist in certain sectors, but not in telecom and AI: software stacks are incompatible, export controls run in both directions, and US chip sales carry government-to-government security assurance requirements that a Chinese-supplied facility cannot satisfy. Early procurement decisions therefore lock in an ecosystem for the asset’s operational life. Chinese vendors, meanwhile, continue to expand their footprint across Central Asian and South Caucasus telecoms at more accessible rates and without political contingencies attached. 

Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have spent the past year moving deliberately toward Washington, joining the Board of Peace for Gaza. Kazakhstan became the first country in four years to join the Abraham Accords, signed onto Pax Silica and the AI Opportunity Partnership. It awarded a 70-percent controlling stake in the world’s largest known undeveloped tungsten deposit to US-based Cove Capital in an industry China overwhelmingly dominates. At the C5+1 summit at the White House in November 2025, Kazakhstan concluded around $17 billion in commercial agreements. In December, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev are expected in Miami as guests at the G-20 summit that President Donald Trump will host. 

American interests across this region are pressing: minerals, transit, energy, and now compute. These governments have chosen the United States as their partner for each of those frontiers. What remains is for the United States to strengthen the relationships by eliminating decades-old legislative fossils that American diplomacy has long left behind.

About the Author: Akbota Karibayeva Meyer

Dr. Akbota Karibayeva Meyer is a research fellow at the Caspian Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a geopolitical risk analyst specializing in energy security, digital connectivity, governance, and political economy in Central Asia. She has also worked with the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, Freedom House, and the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University. Her policy commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and Zentralasien-Analysen.

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