Kyivstar, Veon partner with Ukraine govt

Kyivstar Group Ltd. (Nasdaq: KYIV; KYIVW), Ukraine’s leading digital operator and a subsidiary of VEON Ltd. (Nasdaq: VEON), has partnered with the Ukrainian government to develop the country’s national large language model (LLM). The initiative, led by Kyivstar in collaboration with the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence under Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, will use Google’s Gemma model as its base, leveraging Vertex AI infrastructure. The LLM aims to accurately represent the Ukrainian language and its dialects while ensuring secure processing of sensitive data, a critical requirement for sectors such as government, healthcare, and finance.

This project follows Kyivstar’s historic Nasdaq listing in August 2025, which made it pure-play Ukrainian investment opportunity. The development of the Ukrainian LLM is part of VEON’s broader strategy to close the AI language gap across its markets, following similar initiatives in Kazakhstan and Pakistan. Kyivstar and VEON have committed to investing USD 1 billion in Ukraine between 2023 and 2027, supporting infrastructure, technological development, and strategic acquisitions.

The Ukrainian LLM is expected to serve as a foundation for AI-powered services across public and private sectors, including regulatory analysis, education, and healthcare. Kyivstar will optimize the model for Ukrainian, refine the tokenizer, and train it on curated datasets to ensure linguistic accuracy and relevance. The initiative underscores Kyivstar’s role as a key player in Ukraine’s digital transformation and highlights the growing integration of AI in the country’s technological landscape.