How Pakistan Is Using AI Data Centres to Turn Surplus Electricity Into Opportunity
Pakistan's strangest asset sits idle most nights: thousands of megawatts of generation capacity we still pay for whether anyone uses them or not. In 2025 the government tried to give that surplus a job — AI data centres and Bitcoin mining. Whether that's vision or wishful thinking depends entirely on execution.
What has actually been announced
- A 2,000 MW allocation for AI data centres and crypto mining, announced through the Finance Ministry and the Pakistan Crypto Council in May 2025, with an initial 200 MW tranche tendered.
- The PCC itself, a government body under the Finance Ministry led by Bilal Bin Saqib, tasked with regulating digital assets and the compute build-out.
- A national Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, floated by the finance minister at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas — surplus computing power notionally allocated to a sovereign holding.
- Pilots and MOUs, including a 100 MW AI cluster scoped near Gwadar with Huawei Cloud, and heads of terms signed with foreign compute and mining firms such as Phoenix Group.
Announcements are paper. Paper is how things start here — and also how they often end.
Why the idea is sound
The core logic is hard to argue with. Roughly 7,000 MW of capacity sits under-utilised while capacity payments pile into the circular debt the rest of us service through tariffs. Marginal-cost power for new compute has been floated around Rs 24 per unit — a fraction of what consumers pay, and revenue for megawatts that currently earn nothing. Meanwhile none of the big hyperscalers — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — runs a local Pakistan region, so every local app pays the latency and bandwidth tax of serving users from abroad. Local compute is the seed of fixing that, and the dollar revenue it could bring is exactly the kind of export Pakistan struggles to find.
Where it breaks
- Rs 24 is still expensive. Global mining hubs run cheaper; if the delivered tariff creeps up, operators simply pick Paraguay, Bhutan or Texas.
- The grid. Data centres need uptime guarantees the national grid has never given anyone. Transmission constraints are not a marketing problem.
- Water and cooling. The cheapest surplus power is often where water isn't.
- Policy stability. Mining and digital assets need legal clarity that survives an election cycle — and the IMF's opinion of subsidised tariffs.
- People. If everything is foreign-built and foreign-run, the local benefit is a guard's salary. NUST, FAST and LUMS graduates should be running these halls, not watching them.
What decides it
Tariffs delivered at the meter rather than in press releases. Renewable pairing — Balochistan's solar is world-class, and a solar-plus-storage pilot has already been announced. Transparent contracting, so the surplus doesn't quietly become someone's licence to print. And honesty about sequencing: domestic hospitals and industry should never queue behind a mining container.
All this talk of megawatts keeps reminding me what electricity is actually for. In Gaza, a hospital generator's hum is the line between surgery and silence — power treated as survival, bombed and repaired by hand. Any country blessed with surplus should hold it like something borrowed, not owned.
Compute for machines is one bet; our desk bets on people. Between bookings we follow the same grid news, because our favourite surplus is a running fan in a Swat guesthouse in July and a lit dining room in a Hunza hotel in December — the load Pakistan's valleys carry beautifully. HTG Travels, from Sialkot, for the human side of the megawatts.
