Pakistan's AI Data Centres Are Arriving Megawatt by Megawatt, Into a Winter Gas Squeeze

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. 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.

Pakistan's power sector has the opposite problem to most data centre markets. 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. Part of the reason is that grid demand has not grown as planners expected. The case for data centres as absorbers of surplus power is strongest in winter, when demand falls.

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. Household gas is already rationed to three windows a day: 6am to 9am, noon to 3pm, and 6pm to 9pm. 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.