ISLAMABAD — Pakistan has kicked off a three-year push to modernize artificial intelligence infrastructure across the public sector, with the state-run National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) signing a landmark agreement with Data Vault Pakistan to deliver high-performance computing capacity from government-controlled data centers.
The Deal: GPUaaS and MaaS for Government Institutions
Under the agreement, Data Vault Pakistan will supply NTC with High-Performance Graphics Processing Unit as a Service (GPUaaS) and Model as a Service (MaaS), giving federal institutions on-demand access to AI compute and pre-hosted large language models without relying on foreign cloud providers.
The arrangement positions NTC as a dedicated sovereign AI platform for the federal government, allowing public-sector bodies to run AI training and inference workloads while keeping sensitive data stored and processed entirely within Pakistan and under Pakistani jurisdiction.
Hardware and AI Models on Offer
NTC will host the infrastructure at its secure, government-operated data centers, built around enterprise-grade, NVIDIA-licensed GPUs, including:
- NVIDIA H200
- NVIDIA A100
- NVIDIA B200
The platform is set to host a range of large language models for government use, including Llama 3.1, GPT-OSS 20B, Qwen3 32B, and Kimi K2, alongside text-to-speech services, all managed within NTC’s environment.
Officials Cite Digital Sovereignty as Core Driver
NTC Managing Director Maj Gen (R) Ali Farhan said the project is meant to cut government reliance on public cloud services while giving institutions secure, locally hosted computing power. “Computing power is the backbone of modern digital infrastructure,” he said, adding that hosting AI models domestically is a decisive step toward protecting Pakistan’s digital sovereignty.
Data Vault Pakistan, which will implement the project and provide ongoing operational support, has committed to 99.9 percent service availability. The company’s leadership framed the partnership as part of a broader effort to keep the country’s data, compute, and AI infrastructure under national control, tying the initiative to Pakistan’s wider ambitions for AI-driven economic growth and improved digital public services.
Building on Existing Local AI Capacity
The agreement extends Data Vault Pakistan’s existing GPU cloud footprint, which includes a solar-powered AI data facility in Karachi launched in partnership with Telenor Pakistan in December 2025. That earlier rollout gave local businesses their first access to in-country GPU capacity; the new NTC deal extends similar sovereign compute capability to federal government institutions specifically.
What It Means
The initiative reflects a broader shift among Pakistani policymakers toward treating AI compute and data hosting as matters of national infrastructure, rather than services to be outsourced to international cloud vendors. If implemented as planned over the next three years, it would give federal agencies a dedicated, locally hosted alternative for AI workloads ranging from model inference to public-service applications, while keeping government data within national borders.
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