Pakistan's digital infrastructure plans have moved from policy documents to concrete buildings in 2026. In August, ZTE and the local cloud provider SKY47 launched Karakoram-01 in Islamabad, described as Pakistan's first purpose-built, AI-ready Tier III data centre, with a total power capacity of 8.5 MW. The same month, CMPak (Zong), a subsidiary of China Mobile, asked the Sindh government to support a planned AI-ready data centre in Karachi's Korangi Industrial Area with around 1,600 racks and a requirement of about 20 MW. In June, Quantum Global Data Centre, a venture of the Gul Ahmed Energy Group, announced plans for what it called Pakistan's largest Tier III data centre, with an initial investment of $230 million that could rise to $600 million.
These projects arrive at an awkward moment for the power system. Pakistan has surplus generating capacity and pays heavily for it, but this winter it is short of the imported gas that runs much of that capacity.
Small loads, big ambitions
The numbers put the sector in perspective. In May 2025, the finance ministry said the government had allocated 2,000 MW of electricity in the first phase of a national initiative to power bitcoin mining and AI data centres. The largest projects now visible are a small fraction of that. Karakoram-01 is 8.5 MW. The Zong facility would need about 20 MW. QGDC has not published a capacity figure, and it expects its facility to begin operating in 2027.
Policy has given the sector direction. The federal cabinet approved the National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2025 on 30 July 2025, setting goals of training a million AI professionals by 2030 and creating 1,000 local AI products within five years. The strategy calls for a national AI compute grid built on high-performance computing centres with specialised AI hardware, supported by industry-led data centres. CMPak said its Karachi project follows the Data Governance Policy 2026, the AI policy, the Cloud First Policy and the Digital Pakistan Vision, with their emphasis on data sovereignty and local hosting.
QGDC's chairman, Danish Iqbal, said in June that Pakistan was still in the early stages of AI adoption but was already spending between $700 million and $800 million a year on computing, and warned that demand for computing power would rise sharply.
The capacity paradox
Pakistan's power sector has the opposite problem to most data centre markets. It does not lack installed capacity. It lacks customers who pay for it.
Electricity consumers paid Rs1,565 billion in capacity payments during the last fiscal year, more than the Rs1,167 billion cost of generating electricity, according to official documents reported by SAMAA TV on 5 October 2026. Total collections stood at Rs2,935 billion. Capacity payments go to power plants for being available, whether or not they run.
Part of the reason is that grid demand has not grown as planners expected. Consumers have built around 38 GW of distributed solar across the residential, industrial, agricultural and commercial sectors, according to a June 2026 study by the energy think tank Ember. Ember found that distributed solar is "absorbing demand growth outside the grid," with national electricity demand up 21% in two years once solar output is counted.
That is why the government has courted large, steady loads like data centres and crypto miners. A 2024 Power Division proposal offered a marginal cost tariff of Rs22 to Rs23 per kWh to energy-intensive users including data centres, arguing it would increase consumption of surplus power and reduce the per-unit burden of capacity charges. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has resisted sector-specific tariffs, and the Power Division secretary told a Senate committee in July 2025 that the lender had not agreed.
Winter changes the arithmetic
The case for data centres as absorbers of surplus power is strongest in winter, when demand falls. This winter, the surplus may be harder to find.
QatarEnergy declared force majeure on 4 March 2026 after the attack on its Ras Laffan plant, and it has not been formally lifted, The News reported in late September. Pakistan received two cargoes from Qatar in September. Officials say the country will need nine LNG cargoes in December alone to meet domestic, industrial and power sector requirements. Domestic gas production is around 3.2 billion cubic feet per day, with contracts for around 1 bcfd of imported LNG from Qatar and Eni.
Household gas is already rationed to three windows a day: 6am to 9am, noon to 3pm, and 6pm to 9pm. "The power sector also consumes imported gas, including the less available RLNG, for power generation," a Petroleum Division official told The News.
When LNG is short, gas-fired power plants on the grid either run on more expensive fuel, such as furnace oil, or sit idle while the system still pays their capacity charges. For a data centre, that matters in two ways. The marginal cost of grid power rises, and the risk of load management grows. Industrial and commercial users in Pakistan already plan for outages with diesel or gas backup, and a data centre's backup systems become more important in a winter of fuel scarcity.
The water question
The QGDC announcement drew public criticism on one more front. Readers commenting on Dawn's report raised the issue of water use, noting that large data centres use significant volumes for cooling in a country facing water stress. Newer AI facilities such as Karakoram-01 use cold-plate liquid cooling, which ZTE said enables flexible cooling for high-density computing. The design choice will matter more as projects scale.
What to watch
The next few months will test how Pakistan's digital ambitions sit alongside its energy constraints. The first marker is the Annual Delivery Plan for Qatari LNG cargoes for the 2026-27 winter, which a Qatari delegation was due to finalise during a visit from 30 September to 15 October. The second is whether the government and the IMF reach agreement on a tariff for large new loads. The third is whether projects like the Zong facility secure grid connections with firm supply terms.
For now, Pakistan's AI data centres are small enough that the grid can serve them without difficulty in normal conditions. The question for investors is whether the power system can offer the reliability a data centre needs in a winter when the fuel, rather than the capacity, is missing.