The world is increasingly moving towards achieving greater degrees of AI sovereignty–that is, the ability to develop, deploy, and regulate AI systems and the supporting infrastructure. Stanford’s AI Index 2026 notes that ‘AI sovereignty is becoming a defining feature of national policy,’ and ‘state-backed investments in AI supercomputing are rising.’ 

Pakistan has not remained detached from this global trend. To cite a recent example, Ignite - National Technology Fund, a Government of Pakistan organisation under the Ministry of IT & Telecommunication (MoITT), has invited bids to design, deploy, operate, and maintain sovereign national AI infrastructure to support the development, training, and deployment of advanced AI models within the country. 

What forms the physical backbone of this AI infrastructure is data centres. Industry insiders suggest that their capacities will need to be expanded if Pakistan is to pursue such initiatives at scale. Expanding domestic capacity will also be necessary to ensure that sensitive government and citizens’ data can be stored within the country. The question is thus no longer whether data centres should be expanded but how to address concerns surrounding their expansion.

In Pakistan, as elsewhere in the world, one of the pressing debates relates to the water footprint of data centres. To put things into perspective, data centres produce an enormous amount of heat that needs to be continually removed to keep the equipment from overheating. In a typical water-cooled........

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