Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir inaugurated on Friday Pakistan’s ‘largest’ data centre and AI cloud called Sky 47 Karakoram One. The project has a capacity of 8.5 megawatts. Sky47 is also developing a 5MW data centre at Karachi’s Port Qasim, which is expected to be completed by September.
Speaking at the ceremony, PM Shehbaz remarked that the facility is “awe-inspiring”, adding that it was built in record time. He even He commended the leadership of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) and Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Field Marshal Asim Munir, under whose supervision the data centre was built.
“If we follow this model, there is no reason — and I am absolutely convinced, more than ever before — that not only will we be able to make up for the losses of the past, but we will also create a new, dynamic and forward-looking Pakistan, which is the need of the hour,” he remarked.
Despite the challenges and difficulties, one must have the “will to negotiate” and “the ardent hope and the energy to turn that into a great opportunity”, he said. Characterising the data centre as “the future of Pakistan”, PM Shehbaz also commended the leadership of the minister and secretary for IT.
This is the largest data centre in Pakistan both in terms of power capacity, but also in terms of GPUs we have deployed, said Hassan Abbas, the CEO of Sky47 Limited while speaking on On My Radar with Kamran Khan Friday night. So the large language models, which are essential for AI, we have deployed them locally and providing these services to the customers. The data hosted outside Pakistan, all the payment for it is made in foreign exchange. There is also the issue of latency, since your data is outside so there is a time delay. With this, we plan to cover two things. First, we can bring the data outside and host it here. It will be economically viable for them. Secondly, companies have built small data centres, if they refresh them or maintain them then there’s unnecessary economies of scale.
He did agree that energy cost is already high in the country, but remarked that the government is working on initiatives to improve tariffs.
Minister for IT and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja, while speaking at the inauguration, termed the data centre “a step in the right direction”. She said that according to McKinsey, the global demand for data centres would triple by 2030, while according to Goldman Sachs, power requirements would also rise by 160 per cent by the same year. “This is where Pakistan’s opportunity is extraordinary,” she said.
In November 2025, Pakistan launched it’s first-ever locally hosted AI data centre and sovereign AI cloud by Telenor in partnership with Data Vault.
In February 2025, a data centre was inaugurated at the NED University of Engineering and Technology. The facility, according to university officials, was the country’s first “tier-3 certified data centre” aimed at providing best IT services to the public and the private sector.
In 2026, Gul Ahmed Energy Group in partnership with Huawei Pakistan announced that they are building a data centre and a technology park in Pakistan to support the country’s digital transformation. The venture, titled Quantum Global Data Centre (QGDC), will be Pakistan’s largest Tier III data centre and is expected to operational in 2027 with an initial investment of $230 million, Bloomberg reported
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