Gul Ahmed Energy Group has announced plans to develop what is set to become the largest data centre in Pakistan through its venture Quantum Global Data Centre, with an initial investment of $230 million and a timeline targeting operational status in 2027. The investment is structured to scale to $600 million over the following three to four years, making it one of the most substantial private sector commitments to digital infrastructure in the country’s history.
The announcement was made at the Q Summit in Karachi on June 5, where Quantum Global Data Centre simultaneously signed a strategic partnership agreement with Huawei Pakistan to develop the facility alongside an adjacent science and technology park aimed at supporting Pakistan’s broader digital transformation agenda. The Tier III classification of the planned data centre means it will be designed to meet internationally recognised standards for redundancy, uptime, and operational reliability, positioning it to serve enterprise clients, cloud service providers, and government institutions that require guaranteed levels of availability for critical workloads.
Quantum Global Data Centre Chairman Danish Iqbal made the urgency of building domestic infrastructure explicit at the summit, noting that Pakistan is currently spending between $700 million and $800 million annually on Artificial Intelligence-related computing even at the earliest stages of adoption, and warned that demand will rise sharply as Artificial Intelligence use deepens across the economy. Iqbal stated that without domestic data centre capacity, Pakistan risks importing billions of dollars worth of computing power and data services indefinitely, describing the country as being at a critical decision point where failing to act now would mean missing an opportunity that would be far more costly to recover later. Speakers at the summit reinforced this argument by highlighting that investment in digital infrastructure carries disproportionate economic impact as Pakistani businesses, hospitals, educational institutions, and government services continue migrating to cloud-based systems.
The project arrives as the Sindh provincial government separately announced its own Artificial Intelligence centre and Information Technology Tower initiatives in Karachi, and as the Karachi Technopolis and the Quantum Global Data Centre project were also cited at the KHI NEXT Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Summit the following week. Taken together, the concentration of these announcements within a single week reflects a coordinated surge in Karachi-focused digital infrastructure ambition, with the Quantum Global Data Centre facility positioned as the anchor private sector investment at the centre of that broader ecosystem push.
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