THE government has recently inaugurated an artificial intelligence (AI) data centre and cloud computing facility in Islamabad, named the Sky47 Karakoram-01. The move is being considered an effort to usher the country into a new digital economy. Another AI data centre, titled Indus-01, is being established in Karachi, which is likely to be functional later this year. Such technological advancement is good, but there is a downside, too.
Pakistan is the 15th most water-insecure country in the world. Karachi, the financial capital of the country, struggles with municipal, civic and infrastructural issues, and has a longstanding water crisis.
Yet, instead of turning our focus to the rather more pressing matters on the ground, we tend to compete in a race that will inevitably destroy our own dwindling resources. We are already witnessing the surge of falling water levels due to AI centres in developed countries, like the United States where Michigan, Ohio and Texas have reported an alarming decline in the lakes because AI data centres require gallons upon gallons of ground-water to cool down machine-learning and other high-demand, energy-heavy processes.
If we must truly build a resource-hungry data centre in a city like Karachi, which is already falling apart, we need to have serious dialogue about infrastruc-ture governance regarding AI centres in the landscape of water scarcity, and how we can actually make a digital economy sustainable for our enerations to come.
Saba Kashif
Karachi
Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2026
