Azerbaijan wants to become a tech hub as its startups raised $2.6m last year
Every petrostate eventually discovers that the oil will not last forever, and Azerbaijan has reached the stage of the story where the government starts talking about technology.
Hydrocarbons once made up roughly 75% of the country’s economic output and 90% of its exports, according to the IMF, which is a comfortable arrangement right up until the moment it is not.
So Baku has begun assembling the familiar toolkit of the aspiring tech hub, and the effort is worth watching, if only because the gap between the pitch and the delivery is where these stories usually live.
The instinct is not unique to the Caspian, either: across the region, oil money has been chasing servers and startups for years, with mixed results, as the Gulf’s own bet on AI data centres has lately shown.
Technology accounted for 2.1% of gross domestic product in 2025, up from 1.9% the year before, a...
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