Data Vault and Telenor Pakistan have launched the nation's first dedicated AI data center in Karachi. It is designed to support startups, researchers, and government agencies with high-performance computing and GPU-as-a-service offerings. It is equipped with more than 3,000 Nvidia's highest performance H100 and H200 GPUs for which the Trump Administration issued export licenses. These GPUs cost from $40,000 to $60,000 each, making the Nvidia chips the biggest chunk of the investment made in this AI data center. Other data centers in Pakistan also support AI workloads but this new data center in Karachi is specially designed for AI. It puts the country on a short list of only a handful of nations with locally hosted AI data centers. Pakistanis rank among the world's top five users of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, securing the fourth spot among 21 nations surveyed by the Schwartz Reisman Institute.

The local hosting of data in Pakistan ensures data sovereignty to comply with national data protection and security standards. It also achieves faster response times for queries.  The data center runs entirely on solar power, making it a green data center solution. Additionally, the government of Pakistan has allocated 2,000 MW of power from the national grid for AI data centers. 

One of the objectives of locally hosted AI data centers is to support Urdu language models (LLMs) trained to help Pakistani consumers who wish to use AI chatbots in local languages. A number of Urdu LLMs have already been developed in the country, including Alif and UrduLlama, both based on the open-source Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct architecture. Another model named UrduGPT is described as Pakistan's own large language model, UrduGPT is fine-tuned specifically for Urdu and regional languages of Pakistan using local datasets and cultural semantics to ensure relevance for native speakers.

Currently, Pakistan has 27 data centers located in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, operated by PTCL, Multinet, and Cybernet. More are being built. Zong, a local mobile phone service operator owned by China Mobile, is building AI-driven cloud infrastructure in Pakistan. Indus Cloud and Huawei have a strategic partnership that aims to launch a next-generation cloud data center, incorporating energy-efficient Huawei technology. XDS and Al Nahal IT Park are partnering to build a liquid-cooled data center at the Al Nahal IT Park in Sindh province. Mari Petroleum Company Limited (MPCL), the state-owned oil and gas firm, is diversifying by forming a subsidiary, Mari Technologies, to build Tier III and Tier IV data centers in Islamabad and Karachi, with the 5MW Islamabad facility set for completion by early 2026.