The Gul Ahmed Energy Group has announced plans to build Pakistan’s largest Tier III data center through its venture Quantum Global Data Centre, with an initial investment of $230 million. The facility will become operational in 2027, with the investment potentially scaling to $600 million over the next three to four years.
The announcement came at the Q Summit in Karachi on June 5, where QGDC simultaneously signed a strategic partnership agreement with Huawei Pakistan to develop the data center and an adjacent science and technology park aimed at supporting Pakistan’s broader digital transformation agenda.
QGDC Chairman Danish Iqbal made the urgency of domestic infrastructure development explicit at the summit. He noted that Pakistan is currently spending between $700 million and $800 million annually on AI-related computing, even at the earliest stages of adoption, and warned that demand would rise sharply as AI use deepens across the economy. Without domestic data centre capacity, he said, Pakistan risks importing billions of dollars worth of computing power and data services indefinitely.
“Right now, with this minimal AI, we haven’t even started,” Iqbal said. “For our economies to grow, we need to go to very high AI compute. And that compute, without data centres, we will not be able to do.”
He added that Pakistan stood at a critical decision point: “We are at that stage that if we don’t take this chance right now, we will miss this boat. And this will be a very costly boat, which we will not be able to build.”
Speakers at the summit argued that investment in digital infrastructure carries outsized economic impact, particularly as Pakistani businesses, hospitals, educational institutions, and government services migrate to cloud-based systems.
The project arrives as Sindh province separately announced its own AI centre and IT Tower initiatives in Karachi, underscoring the concentration of Pakistan’s digital infrastructure ambitions in its largest city.
