ISLAMABAD — Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday inaugurated Pakistan’s largest data centre and the Sky47 AI cloud in Islamabad, characterizing the state-of-the-art facility as an “awe-inspiring” milestone that represents the future of the nation. The newly launched facility boasts an initial capacity of 8.5 megawatts (MW). Developed in record time through a synchronized civil-military collaboration, the project was executed under the supervision of Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Field Marshal Asim Munir. Speaking at the ceremony, PM Shehbaz called the facility a wonderful gift to the nation, noting that it offers impregnable digital security and proves that the country can overcome past losses by embracing dynamic infrastructure. He further announced that similar data centres are slated for development in Karachi and Lahore, directing all state organs to immediately align their operations with the new facility.
During the ceremony, Minister for IT and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja highlighted that the data centre provides the foundational high-performance computing infrastructure necessary to drive Pakistan’s modern economy, national security, healthcare, and public administration. She contextualized the project within PM Shehbaz’s overarching “Digital Nation Pakistan” vision, which recently achieved the successful 5G spectrum auction, the doubling of undersea fibre capacity, and wide-reaching broadband reforms. The launch follows a sequence of major digital advancements in Pakistan, including a 5MW facility currently being built by Sky47 at Karachi’s Port Qasim, a localized AI data centre launched by Telenor in late 2025, and a separate $230 million Tier III data centre initiative recently announced by Quantum Global Data Centre (QGDC) in partnership with Huawei.
