KARACHI(National Times)- Quantum Global Data Centre (QGDC), a venture of the Gul Ahmed Energy Group, announced plans on Thursday to develop Pakistan’s largest Tier III data centre, which is expected to become operational in 2027 with an initial investment of $230 million, Bloomberg reported.

The project’s investment could rise to $600 million over the next three to four years.

The announcement came as QGDC signed a strategic partnership agreement with Huawei Pakistan to develop the facility and a science and technology park to support Pakistan’s digital transformation, according to the press release.

Speaking at the Q Summit, QGDC Chairman Danish Iqbal said that, although Pakistan was still in the early stages of AI adoption, it was already spending between $700m and $800m annually, warning that demand for computing power would rise sharply in the coming years.

“Right now, with this minimal AI, we haven’t even started,” he said. “For our economies to grow, we need to go to very high AI compute. And that compute, without data centres, we will not be able to do.” He warned that Pakistan could end up importing billions of dollars’ worth of computing capacity and data services if domestic infrastructure is not developed.

“We are at that stage that if we don’t take this chance right now, we will miss this boat,” Mr Iqbal said. “And this will be a very costly boat, which we will not be able to build.”

He said the country’s local demand for data centre capacity was already significant and would continue to increase as businesses, hospitals, educational institutions and digital services migrate to cloud-based systems.

Speakers at the summit argued that investment in digital infrastructure could have an outsized economic impact.