Alperen Aktaş
22 September 2025•Update: 22 September 2025
ISTANBUL
US President Donald Trump on Monday announced that Kazakhstan signed a $4 billion deal to purchase American locomotives and rail equipment, calling it “the largest railroad equipment purchase in history” following his phone call with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
“They have signed the largest Railroad Equipment Purchase in History, $4 Billion Dollars Worth of United States Locomotives and Rail Equipment. We need to support our U.S. Rail Industry, which has been attacked by Fake Environmentalists for years,” Trump wrote on the US social media company Truth Social, congratulating Tokayev on the agreement.
Earlier in the day, Tokayev met with US Presidential Special Envoy for South and Central Asia Sergio Gore in New York, congratulating him on his appointment and pledging support for his mission.
He reaffirmed Kazakhstan’s commitment to advancing the Kazakh-American strategic partnership, emphasizing the country’s role as Washington’s main economic partner in Central Asia.
Tokayev also held talks with Yann LeCun, vice president of Meta and chief scientific officer of the Artificial Intelligence Research Department (FAIR). He highlighted Kazakhstan’s focus on digitalization and artificial intelligence, noting efforts to develop an autonomous AI ecosystem and a Kazakh large language model (KazLLM).
The Kazakh president welcomed the launch of a joint acceleration program with Meta platforms to strengthen cooperation in AI research and application.
Separately, Howard Lutnick, chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, said a Trump–Tokayev call resulted in what he described as the “largest locomotive agreement in history,” worth $4 billion.
Lutnick called the deal a symbol of “American innovation leading the world,” supporting jobs in Texas and Pennsylvania and boosting connectivity across the Middle Corridor with US technology.
