Pakistan’s IT minister announced Buraq, a government-backed Urdu AI model, on October 22 at a World Bank summit in Seoul. According to Federal Minister for IT and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja, the model will keep all Pakistani data inside the country.
Buraq will understand and generate text in Urdu and other regional languages. Currently, Urdu makes up just 0.03% of global web content that Common Crawl gathered, which means most AI models struggle with the language. As a result, the government decided to build its own model from scratch.
Khawaja also shared the news at the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026, which ran October 19 to 22 in Seoul. According to the minister, Pakistan also became the first country to sign the Digital and AI Compact at the event. She described AI as “the last layer, not the first” of digital development.
To support Buraq, Pakistan plans to set up sovereign computing power so that data processing stays within the country. The government has committed $1 billion in funding through 2030 for AI, regulatory changes, and public-sector AI projects. In particular, this includes AI deployments in welfare, healthcare, and tax systems. Furthermore, the country recently launched its first local AI cloud through a partnership between Telenor Pakistan and Data Vault Pakistan.
The minister also highlighted four digital foundations that Buraq will build on. These include NADRA’s digital identity system, which serves over 100 million Pakistanis, and the State Bank’s Raast instant payment platform. In addition, the national data exchange WASL handles secure data sharing between government agencies.
Khawaja stressed that AI should help people make decisions, not make decisions for them. Additionally, she said the government will keep human oversight at the center of all AI systems. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s National Data Governance Policy sets rules for storing, sharing, and protecting government data.
Since Buraq is still in development, there is no website or public demo. No release date and technical specs have been shared yet.
