Valve paid more VAT in Kazakhstan than Apple, Google or any other foreign digital company in the first half of 2026. Steam’s owner paid about 11.21 billion tenge in value-added tax over those six months, ahead of Temu, Apple and Google Play, according to a ranking reviewed by tax expert Dmitry Kazantsev for the Kazakh outlet Digital Business.
Part of the reason sits across the border. For several years, players from Russia have been moving their Steam accounts to the Kazakhstan region, and the VAT on their purchases now counts towards Kazakhstan’s total.
Steam tops Kazakhstan’s foreign tax ranking
The figures cover VAT paid by foreign digital companies registered in Kazakhstan between January and June 2026. To show what each payment means in sales, we also worked out the implied spending, including tax, using Kazakhstan’s standard 16% VAT rate.
| Rank | Company | VAT paid (tenge) | Implied spending incl. VAT (tenge) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Valve (Steam) | 11.21 billion | 81.3 billion |
| 2 | Temu | 10.06 billion | 72.9 billion |
| 3 | Apple | 8.54 billion | 61.9 billion |
| 4 | Google Play | 5.35 billion | 38.8 billion |
| 5 | TikTok | 1.47 billion | 10.7 billion |
| 6 | OpenAI (ChatGPT) | 1.12 billion | 8.1 billion |
| 7 | Anthropic (Claude) | 1.10 billion | 8.0 billion |
| 8 | Lamoda | 0.90 billion | 6.5 billion |
Kazantsev put Valve’s implied figure at around 81.3 billion tenge, and our calculation matches it. In plain terms, Steam users in Kazakhstan spent more on games, DLC and marketplace items in six months than they spent through Apple’s App Store in the same period. That is a striking result for a country of around 20 million people.
It is also notable for how far ahead of Google Play Steam sits. Valve paid more than double Google’s VAT, even though Android phones are far more common than gaming PCs.
Why Russian players are moving their Steam accounts to Kazakhstan
According to iXBT.games, which reported the ranking, Russian gamers have been actively switching their Steam accounts to the Kazakhstan region in recent years, and their spending helped push Valve to the top.
The reasons go back to 2022, when Visa, Mastercard and PayPal suspended their services in Russia. That made it much harder to pay for games directly, and some publishers also stopped selling in the Russian store. A Kazakhstan account, topped up with Kazakh payment methods or gift cards, became a common workaround, and prices in tenge are often competitive.
Switching regions is not something Valve encourages. Steam ties an account’s store region to the user’s location and payment method, and its Subscriber Agreement bans using false information to get regional pricing. Players who move regions without actually living there take on the risk of restrictions on their account.
What it shows about Steam’s reach
Steam is used across the world, but its revenue rarely shows up in public data like this. Valve is a private company and does not publish country sales figures, so tax rankings are one of the few places its regional strength becomes visible.
Valve has also been expanding beyond software, most recently with the launch of its Steam Machine. However, Kazakhstan’s numbers show that the store is still the business doing the heavy lifting.
Neither Valve nor Kazakhstan’s tax authorities have commented on the ranking. If the second half of 2026 follows the same pattern, Valve could finish the year as Kazakhstan’s largest foreign digital taxpayer, ahead of companies that are many times its size.
