It was 1993 and a few crazy nerds in Pakistan were experimenting with external modems hooked up to their clunky PCs trying to connect to a BBS or the UNDP funded store-and-forward email service to join the global Internet community. These, and a few more, would be the first people who would, in 1994, connect to live, online dial-up Internet with Digicom, the pioneering ISP in Pakistan. By 1995, Pakistan was in the grip of the Internet revolution, albeit in its nascent stage. Newspapers and print magazines could not stop talking about the strange, magical phenomena and the public’s imagination was obsessed with what was knocking on their proverbial doors. To those who witnessed this first revolution, the AI revolution that is taking us by storm today in 2026 sounds very familiar in its contours, problems, and potentials.
The first revolution was solely powered by expensive, imported, transit bandwidth that Pakistani ISPs purchased from global operators with scarce (as always) foreign exchange to serve their local customers. The bandwidth localization and saving ideas of peering and local Internet Exchanges (IXs) came very late to the industry. We learned very late that bandwidth could also be local if the content is available inside Pakistan, if the ISPs are connected to Internet Exchanges, and if the right Content Delivery Networks and cache servers are available in Pakistan. Today, Pakistani AI users are experiencing a similar situation. Every serious AI user is buying a $20/mo OpenAI or Anthropic subscription that is equivalent to three months of Internet access cost. This is a massive national foreign exchange drain that will keep on building unless we offer local alternatives to the users. The choice we have is to exploit the Pak-China evergreen bond to get our hands on non-US GPUs, the chips that are essential for AI services from Chinese firms and couple them with open-weight Qwen, Llama and similar AI models that are competing and just breathing over the shoulders of the expensive frontier US AI models. With local AI serving, foreign exchange saving is just one benefit. The larger benefit lies in being able to master and steer our national AI journey.
There are lessons to be learned from the area of collaborative competition that the late 1990s witnessed. ISPs united under ISPAK (Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan) to interact with regional service providers and Internet governance bodies such as APNIC, lobby within Pakistan for PRI lines (that enabled larger dial-in pools), alternate bandwidth sources, and rational tariff structures for their input costs. They also brought in consumer-facing breakthroughs like prepaid Internet cards, local caching and proxy servers and unmetered UIN dial-up and DSL access. Today, Pakistan urgently needs an AI Players Consortium to build an AI engineering talent ecosystem, pool GPU procurement, share domain-specific knowledge and datasets, establish safety benchmarks, and lower unit costs. Pakistan must build locally tailored commercial products (localized language models, SME workflows, offline-capable AI tools) rather than announcing self-aggrandizing superficial API wrappers.
The regulator and the government both must, this time, not be ‘late to the party. Our first round saw a PTA that was bogged down on procedures and faced capacity issues while dealing with the fast-changing industry landscape. The hurdles we faced with spectrum approvals, licensing delays, and equipment clearances in that first round should not be repeated in the age of AI. Hopefully, with much experience, wisdom and collaborative mood now prevailing, both PTA as well as the newly created Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) will address the industry’s growth and stability needs with both long-term consistent policies and short-term interventions.
These efforts would bring two critical national AI goals closer, fast track development of sovereign AI infrastructure & services and a strong tilt towards the creative use of AI beyond its immediate leisure & entertainment value. When AI is served from within Pakistan using technology that we understand and set up on our own, a lot of data leakage and access outage risks are well covered.
The social media addiction phenomenon has laid bare the utter ease with which global digital giants hacked global audiences’ attention. The AI world also comes with its own consumer culture which can only be countered with a willful creative-use effort that is crucial for Pakistan today. The Ministry of IT & Telecommunication (MoITT) and PDA are busy laying very essential groundwork with initiatives like National Data Exchange platform, National Data Governance Policy, Data Protection Law, Pakistan Cloud First Policy etc. and this must immediately be followed by the super structures that will use these digital pillars to bring positive changes to the citizen’s digital lives.
National wealth would be a function of ‘digital creation’ efforts that both the public and the private sector entities would put in action today. The private sector, despite being technologically naive in the late 1990s, took on risks and rolled out services across Pakistan. A lot of them bit the dust but those who survived are leading today’s connectivity landscape. We need similar, bold, risk-taking private sector leadership which is fortunate to have at least ten times more information tools available to them to plan for the perfect local ventures. From AI applications to AI infrastructure, to AI research, Pakistan must embrace AI in a wholesome manner.
Tariq Mustafa is an internet industry pioneer in Pakistan with over 28 years of technology leadership. He is the recipient of the inaugural National Internet Enabler Award 2026 presented by the APNIC Foundation & SANOG.
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