Pakistan's AI ambitions meet power, GPU and talent-retention limits

Writing for the LSE South Asia Centre, M. Faizan Fakhar of the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies argues that Pakistan is falling behind in AI and risks becoming a consumer of foreign systems. He notes that Stanford's Global AI Vibrancy Tool, which ranks 36 countries, does not include Pakistan. In his view policy talk of smart policing, biometric IDs and digital courts is disconnected from basic constraints: unstable and costly electricity, weak high-speed internet, limited data-centre capacity and scarce GPU access, with most users relying on foreign cloud services. About 73,000 IT and computer science graduates finish each year, but limited research funding and opportunity make them hard to retain. His recommendations are to build AI governance and regulatory capacity, fix energy and connectivity, expand GPU access and local data centres, and pursue South-South AI cooperation.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at LSE South Asia Centre: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2026/08/24/pakistans-and-the-global-ai-race/.