Dubai at rush hour, Europe with the gate down — Tashkent has room

A friend moved from Dubai to Tashkent in March. Rent dropped fivefold, tax went from 9% to 7.5%, and his office is now staffed by people who speak Russian and English without an accent.

“It’s like I flew into 2014 Dubai,” he wrote. “Only with broadband and Wolt.”

That’s a joke with real weight behind it. The old hubs filled up, the line at the door got longer, and capital does what capital always does — looks for the next stop.

IT Visa and ICT Week: what they actually are

On paper it reads like another PR program. In practice it’s three concrete things people actually fly in for.

• IT Visa. A three-year residency for IT specialists and their families. Streamlined entry for the whole team — not “through the embassy and three interviews.”
• 7.5% tax. For IT-Park-accredited companies, in place of standard rates. From a P&L perspective this isn’t a “nice bonus”; it’s the gap between profit and survival.
• ICT Week. The region’s main tech forum. This year — delegations from 70+ countries, talk about AI-focused data centers, contracts signed not on stage but in the coffee shops around it.

Add it up and you get something Dubai didn’t have in 2009. Dubai had zero tax and that was it. Tashkent has zero tax plus engineers ready to work from day one.

Why Dubai is no longer the flagship

Dubai didn’t get worse. It’s just that everything that made it unique got copied by its neighbors — but the prices didn’t.

A one-bedroom in Marina now costs what a two-bed in London cost three years ago. Parking at DIFC is the price of a Berlin dinner. The 9% tax trick is now available in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain. And the engineer shortage in-country is the same as it always was — everyone is imported, and six cities are fighting over them at once.

The net: you pay premium-hub prices and get a layover-grade service. Useful sometimes; usually overpriced.

Why Europe closed up

In 2015 a CIS founder could open a GmbH in Berlin in six months, hire from Eastern Europe, raise a round in Paris. In 2026 there’s a gate at every step.

• Visa for non-EU citizens with the “wrong” passport — 6–12 months, with “no reply” sometimes counting as the reply.
• Tax at 40–55% on income, plus social, plus corporate, plus VAT. The founder ends up keeping less than half.
• The bank can close the company account over an “opaque structure” — no explanation, no appeal, routed through AML.
• Regulation moves faster than a startup can launch. AI Act, DSA, DMA — a new acronym every month.

None of this means “Europe is over.” It means Europe is now for things that are already big, already registered, already affording a full-time lawyer. For anything smaller, it’s now a bad launchpad.

China is shifting its export front this way

One shift is visible on the 2026 trade-flow map: Chinese manufacturing, logistics, and fintech increasingly route through Central Asia instead of by sea.

The reasons are mundane: sea lanes are exposed (Red Sea, Strait of Malacca, tariffs), while the Zhengzhou → Tashkent → Istanbul rail line runs every day without surprises. Uzbekistan sits exactly in the middle of that new route.

For a local founder this means Chinese suppliers come here, Chinese banks open branches here, Chinese students enroll in local universities. The line between “trading with China” and “working with China” gets thinner.

Three markets from one point

This is probably the most underestimated advantage Tashkent has.

• Russian — access to the entire CIS. 250 million people, shared financial and legal logic, shared meme language. One marketer covers Minsk, Almaty, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Moscow.
• English — access to the US and international clients. Engineer-level English in Tashkent has noticeably improved over five years — schools, remote work, YouTube.
• Uzbek — 35 million locally and the entire Turkic-speaking world (Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan). Plus — a market your competitor in Berlin will never cover.

Add visa-free entry to Turkey, the UAE, Korea, Malaysia; preferential US transit; easier Schengen and UK access. Flying out of Tashkent is more convenient than it looks.

The main thing: handle it with care

Now the uncomfortable part that usually gets cut from articles like this.

The city is young. It’s growing fast. Which is exactly why every decision being made right now — about urban planning, regulation, education, digital infrastructure — will be visible in ten years. Not “show up somehow.” It will literally become the city.

Dubai was young in 2009 too. Some of the choices made then “because fast” cost everyone money and nerves now — traffic, tariffs, engineer shortages, lopsided development. Tashkent is at the same point. With the same opportunities — and the same risk of repeating someone else’s mistakes on fast-forward.

What that means in practice. If you’re moving here to build — don’t treat the city as “the next hub to flip.” Build things that should still work in twenty years. Hire locals, don’t just import your team. Pay tax, don’t play the scheme. Respect the local rules even when they look odd. Your job as an early resident isn’t to extract maximum value over two years — it’s to leave the place better than you found it.

That sounds like a moral. In this case, the moral and the strategy are the same thing. Hubs that break in five years break exactly because they were built to flip. Hubs that last decades were built by the people who stayed.