Alza billionaire Zavoral breaks his silence to answer CNB chief

Aleš Zavoral, founder and owner of the largest Czech online retailer Alza and the ninth richest person in Czechia, rarely appears in public, but this time he unexpectedly spoke up on the social network X. The occasion was a post by Czech National Bank governor Aleš Michl about new graphics cards for AI.

Michl boasted that the CNB had expanded its artificial intelligence hardware: four more GPUs were added to the existing four. The bank is taking a “hybrid path” — part of the capacity runs on its own infrastructure, part in the cloud, and confidential data never leaves the bank’s perimeter.

Zavoral replied briefly and with humour: “Good work. If data cannot go outside, then AI has to come inside.” He added that when an upgrade is needed, it is enough to place an order before midnight — a hint at the range of Alza itself.

The joke turned out not to be an empty one. Alza’s catalogue really does include an item with a price tag of more than CZK 16.5 million — the most powerful AI servers from Gigabyte built on Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra architecture. This is essentially industrial equipment for training and running large language models and enterprise AI. The ultra-fast memory alone exceeds two terabytes — roughly 90 times more than the best gaming graphics cards (around 24 GB).

Zavoral founded Alza in 1994, when such technologies were still more a matter of scientific speculation. Today the company operates in five markets and its annual turnover exceeds CZK 60 billion. According to Forbes, Zavoral’s own fortune this year stands at CZK 65 billion.

Hardly any photos of him can be found online, and his X profile is almost inactive: apart from two autumn posts, there are only a few advertising posts from the company. That makes his rare public appearance, and his reply to the man who runs the country’s central bank, all the more noticeable.

By the Around Prague newsroom