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The federal government’s Cloud First Policy has begun attracting industry interest, with six cloud service providers applying for accreditation, the National Assembly was informed on Tuesday.
The information was shared by Minister for IT and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja in a written reply to a question raised by MNA Syeda Amnah Batool. She said the applications have been submitted to the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MoITT) and are currently under assessment.
The minister told the House that MoITT has examined the potential use of Pakistan’s locally hosted AI Cloud and Data Centre developed by Data Vault Pakistan, which was launched in November 2025 in collaboration with Nvidia.
She said the facility offers sovereign AI, GPU-as-a-Service, and AI Cloud capabilities, which could support government digital services while ensuring data residency, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance.
“Such infrastructure could play a key role in strengthening government digital services under proper safeguards,” the minister said.
However, the minister clarified that MoITT has not been formally onboarded for production workloads related to the AI Cloud, and Data Vault Pakistan has not yet applied for accreditation under the Cloud First framework.
Any future adoption would be subject to government procedures, security clearances, and inter-ministerial consultations, with the possibility of pilot projects and phased implementation.
She identified possible applications in e-governance platforms, secure government data hosting and analytics, cybersecurity initiatives such as SOCs and CERT, sector-specific AI solutions, and public-sector AI research and innovation.
The minister noted that countries including the US, UK, EU, and UAE have adopted public-private partnership models for sovereign digital and AI services, demonstrating that local AI infrastructure and global cloud providers can coexist under strong governance frameworks.
Pakistan’s Cloud First Policy aims to modernize government IT systems, reduce costs, and improve service delivery by prioritizing cloud-based solutions while safeguarding national data and security interests.
