When Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen wanted to house his fascination with rock music, he didn’t donate to an existing museum — he built one. The Experience Music Project, funded entirely by Allen and shaped around his own collection, opened in Seattle in 2000 and later became the Museum of Pop Culture. Seventeen years later, SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner did something similar in Germany: he financed the reconstruction of a bombed baroque palace in Potsdam to house his Impressionist paintings, opening the Museum Barberini in 2017.
Neither project was philanthropy in the traditional sense of writing a check to someone else’s institution. Both were personal collections turned into permanent public spaces, funded by fortunes made in technology. That pattern now has a name: the tech patron. Its newest example is taking shape somewhere unexpected — a former Soviet bus terminal in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
A hosting company, then a car collection
Alexey Gubarev built his fortune the way Allen and Plattner built theirs: in technology infrastructure, sold at scale. In 2005, he founded Servers.com, a bare-metal hosting company that grew from 20 servers in Limassol, Cyprus, into data centers across North America, Western Europe and Asia.
He sold it to CloudOne Digital in 2023 for an estimated $200 million. He also co-founded Palta, a health-technology studio behind the app Flo, and TechIsland, a nonprofit that helped make Cyprus an attractive destination for skilled workers.
Gubarev bought his first car at 19, but serious collecting only began around 2014. He has said he originally pictured buying a couple of cars a year for one small warehouse, and that the hobby outgrew that plan far faster than expected.
The collection has since passed 200 vehicles, weighted toward what he calls the golden age of automotive design — the 1920s and ’30s — including more than sixty of the sweeping, aerodynamic “boat-tail” cars from that era.
From warehouse to museum
Gubarev is now converting a Soviet-era bus terminal in Bishkek into a permanent home for part of that collection, working with architecture firm IND to preserve the building’s modernist structure while adding exhibition space.
Rather than replacing the original architecture, IND is restoring the terminal’s multi-level circulation, in which separate pedestrian flows once moved at different heights, and reworking elements like the canopy and glazing for contemporary use, while adding new ramps for accessibility.
Around 80 of his cars will go on display, tracing automotive design across American, German, British, French and Soviet traditions.
The layout, designed by creative studio SILA SVETA, is built around a single visitor route rather than a static exhibition hall: visitors enter beneath a suspended LED installation modeled on the Nürburgring racetrack, then move through a sequence of connected spaces, each treating the car from a different angle, engineering, cinema, design, and so on.
Beyond the exhibition halls, Gubarev has said he wants the museum to include open public areas and educational zones, positioning it as a year-round cultural destination rather than a single-collection showcase. The project is expected to open in 2027.
Gubarev has drawn a direct line between the two halves of his career. “You learn to be patient. You learn to wait for the right moment,” he said of collecting, in an interview with the Cyprus Journal of Wealth Management — framing both dealmaking and car-buying as the same exercise in judging rarity and timing.
That philosophy carries into the museum’s own design. Architect Amir Idiatulin of IND, the firm behind the reconstruction, has described the goal as treating architecture as a neutral background rather than a competing element, so that the cars themselves remain the focus of every room.
Why this keeps happening
The tech-patron museum is becoming a recognizable stage in a certain kind of founder’s career: build a company, sell it, then spend years and a share of the proceeds building a physical, permanent expression of something more personal than a cap table. Unlike a foundation grant or a museum wing named after a donor, these projects are built from scratch around one person’s specific taste — Allen’s guitars, Plattner’s Impressionists, Gubarev’s retro cars — and they keep running long after the company that funded them has moved on without its founder.
As more of the founders who built and sold companies over the past two decades reach the same point in their careers, Bishkek’s car museum looks less like an outlier and more like an early entry in a list that is still being written.
