According to the president of Kyivstar, Oleksandr Komarov, the company aims to become one of the leaders of the Ukrainian artificial intelligence market. To this end, the company is developing the Ukrainian language model "Syaivo," plans to create a data center for AI, and is expanding its cloud business. Moreover, the operator does not intend to postpone these projects until the war ends.
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 consisting of three directions.
The first is the Ukrainian language model "Syaivo". Kyivstar is developing it together with the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Currently, the team is moving from testing the version with 4 billion parameters to a much larger one — with 26 billion. According to Komarov, the developers have already received the first Ukrainian datasets for working on the model. In the future, "Syaivo" should become the basis for AI services that the company wants to offer to users.
The second is own capacities for AI operation. Komarov is convinced that Ukraine needs its own AI infrastructure located as close to users as possible. For 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 — cloud services. At the end of October, Kyivstar concluded an agreement to acquire the Ukrainian provider GigaCloud. The value of the deal could reach $50 million. Komarov named the GigaCloud team itself as the greatest value of this acquisition, rather than the company's infrastructure or customer base. According to him, the experience of its engineers will help Kyivstar create its own AI services.
Komarov was also asked whether it is advisable to build expensive data centers in Ukraine during the 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 affected by the war. However, according to Komarov, this did not affect the company's operations, because part of the equipment was placed abroad in advance, 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.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that the Ukrainian language model "Syaivo" began to be tested in closed mode. To evaluate the prototype and find its strengths and weaknesses, the project's relevant scientific committees were involved — linguistic, historical, technical, and ethical-legal.