Smart City Ashgabat: Turkmenistan Extends Digitalization Beyond Urban Developmen

(MENAFN- Trend News Agency) BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 28. The international forum“White City Ashgabat - 2026,” held on May 24-25, served as an important industry platform dedicated to construction and urban infrastructure. It was within the framework of this forum that Turkmenistan presented the“Ashgabat-2045” concept, which envisions a long-term transformation of the capital into a modern smart city with digital, environmental, and intelligent infrastructure.

The project is particularly significant given that Ashgabat currently concentrates a substantial share of the country's economic activity. According to Turkmenistan's Minister of Finance and Economy Mammethguly Astangulov, the capital accounts for more than 27% of the country's GDP, covering industry, construction, transport, communications, financial institutions, and retail networks.

In addition, according to official population census results, around 14.6% of Turkmenistan's population lives in Ashgabat. This makes the capital the largest hub of administrative governance, financial services, infrastructure, and economically active population. Therefore, the country is logically beginning its digital transformation from Ashgabat.

In many ways, the“Ashgabat-2045” concept reflects a broader strategy of Turkmenistan's transition toward new models of economic development. In recent years, the issue of moving toward a digital economy has become increasingly relevant. As Trend previously reported in its article“Turkmenistan bets on AI, 5G and Musk: regional trends require action,” one of the key drivers of Turkmenistan's push toward digitalization is regional dynamics in Central Asia, which require coordinated action among all five countries of the region.

For example, the development of international transport corridors crossing the region requires eliminating bottlenecks along their routes. Such bottlenecks often include customs procedures for cargo processing across the fragmented state borders of Central Asia, as well as inefficiencies in warehouse distribution. The unification of databases, accelerated information exchange, and the creation of a digital platform tracking logistics and business processes could significantly improve progress in addressing these issues.

In this context, the smart city concept may play a much more important role than merely urban development. In modern conditions, a smart city effectively represents a unified digital platform integrating transport, utilities, energy, communications, services, monitoring systems, and elements of public administration.

In the long term, such infrastructure can serve as a foundation for a broader digital system of economic management. Since Ashgabat concentrates government institutions, the financial sector, and coordination of a significant part of industrial activity, the capital can become a testing ground for digital monitoring mechanisms of economic processes.

This may include the introduction of systems for tracking sectoral KPIs, monitoring enterprise productivity, analyzing resource consumption, automating reporting, and integrating various economic entities into a unified digital ecosystem. If successfully tested in Ashgabat, such mechanisms could later be scaled to other regions of Turkmenistan.

This is particularly important for industry, one of the key pillars of the country's economy. Today, Turkmenistan is already focusing on modernizing production, expanding domestic processing, and developing construction industry infrastructure. In his 2025 remarks, Minister of Finance and Economy Mammethguly Astangulov noted that electricity generation, building materials production, as well as light and food industries play an important role in Ashgabat's economic structure.

At the same time, the smart city concept can deliver benefits not only for the state and economy, but also directly for the population. International experience shows that the implementation of intelligent urban management systems is typically associated with improvements in quality of life.

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