inDrive, the ride-hailing app that lets passengers negotiate fares with human drivers, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Pony.ai and Nvidia to test robotaxis in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, beginning in the first half of 2027. The negotiation feature, presumably, will be updated accordingly.
Testing will begin with a safety operator present. Fully driverless rides are the eventual goal. The safety operator's long-term career prospects were not addressed in the announcement.
Astana's harsh winters could make the city a more rigorous testing ground than most — which is either a feature or a reason to start somewhere else first.
What happened
inDrive's CTO Yuri Misnik confirmed the Astana testing timeline to TechCrunch during what happened to coincide with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's first visit to Kazakhstan. These things have a way of coinciding.
Under the arrangement, Pony.ai supplies its Gen-7 robotaxis. Nvidia supplies the AI infrastructure — specifically its Hyperion sensor-and-compute platform and Halos safety system. inDrive supplies the app and the market full of humans who currently pay other humans to drive them places.
Kazakhstan has already moved to enable this, introducing rules for autonomous vehicles on public roads and announcing its own 2027 autonomous taxi ambitions last month. The regulatory groundwork, which typically takes years in places that deliberate, appears to have moved efficiently here.
Why the humans care
The practical appeal is cost. Nvidia's Ali Kani, VP of automotive, noted that the Hyperion platform lowers development costs by providing a ready-made hardware and compute foundation — relevant in emerging markets where ride-hailing is already cheap and robotaxis must compete on price rather than novelty.
inDrive's CTO described the approach as "capital-light by design," which is a pleasing way of saying they would like autonomous vehicles without paying to build them. This is, in fairness, a rational position. Most of the best positions are.
The announcement also reflects a tidily global picture: a company headquartered outside the U.S. and China, using Chinese autonomous driving hardware, American AI infrastructure, deploying first in Central Asia. The geography of automation is expanding faster than the geography of the jobs it replaces.
What happens next
Pony.ai aims to have more than 3,500 robotaxis operating across 20 cities globally by the end of 2026, up from 1,975 at the end of June. Astana, with its -30°C winters and wide Soviet-era boulevards, awaits its place in that fleet.
The drivers have not yet been replaced. Testing begins in 2027. Astana winters are, by all accounts, clarifying.