The Missing Data Centre: Why Pakistan’s Compute Gap Is a Sovereignty Problem Pakistan’s government agencies, banks, and start-ups increasingly run on servers thousands of miles away, and every gigabyte that leaves the country carries a little more of the state’s autonomy with it — even as a handful of new projects promise to close the gap.

Abstract

Pakistan’s installed data-centre capacity stood at roughly 23.5 megawatts of IT load in 2025, a fraction of what comparable digital economies operate, and industry forecasts see that figure only reaching about 53 megawatts by 2030. In the same period, the country is already spending an estimated $700–800 million a year on AI-related technology and cloud services, according to industry executives — money that flows almost entirely to compute sitting outside Pakistan’s borders. Government records, banking data, telecom metadata, and the AI workloads now being pitched as the next growth engine mostly live on servers owned and operated by foreign hyperscalers, not on Pakistani soil.