- On December 2, 2025, the telecommunications operator Telenor Pakistan, in partnership with Data Vault, inaugurated the country’s first domestically hosted AI data center, integrating a sovereign AI cloud – marking a breakthrough that enables Pakistan to achieve AI infrastructure self-sufficiency and accelerate applications in finance, healthcare, public security, and agriculture.
- The center is equipped with enterprise-grade Nvidia GPUs, allowing domestic organizations to access high-performance computing (HPC) power for training and deploying AI models, amid the US ban on exporting Nvidia chips to China and many other countries, which has made GPUs a strategically scarce commodity.
- Data Vault CEO, Mehwish Salman Ali, stated that the company received a “special license” from Nvidia, after passing rigorous technical, financial, and compliance checks, to legally import over 3,000 GPUs and provide GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS).
- Ms. Ali emphasized: “We are the only center in Pakistan offering indigenous GPU infrastructure and AI services. This allows businesses and government agencies to avoid relying on foreign servers.”
- The “sovereign GPU cloud” infrastructure helps keep all data within Pakistani territory, enhancing cybersecurity, identity governance, privacy, and auditability, while preventing the leakage of sensitive data (such as medical records, financial transactions, telecom, and government data).
- This center also opens up opportunities for developing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Urdu and regional languages, along with specialized AI applications for fintech, logistics, education, and manufacturing.
- Previously, many Pakistani organizations had to run AI workloads on international clouds due to the lack of domestic infrastructure. Now, Data Vault provides a “compliance-ready” environment – adhering to national security regulations and international standards.
- Besides Telenor, other sovereign cloud providers include PTCL (state-owned) and NTC, but they do not yet possess GPU clusters of similar scale.
📌 Summary: The telecommunications operator Telenor Pakistan, in partnership with Data Vault, inaugurated the country’s first domestically hosted AI data center, integrating a sovereign AI cloud with 3,000 GPUs and offering GPU-as-a-Service. This marks a breakthrough enabling Pakistan to achieve AI infrastructure self-sufficiency and accelerate applications in finance, healthcare, public security, and agriculture. The “sovereign GPU cloud” infrastructure helps maintain all data within Pakistani territory.
