Data Vault Pakistan’s Karachi facility: US giant studies AI Data Centre upgrade

KARACHI: A team from US server and data centre giant Super Micro Computer Inc (Supermicro) has visited Pakistan to carry out a feasibility study for deploying next-generation AI chips at Data Vault Pakistan’s Karachi facility.

The study is understood to focus on the deployment of Nvidia’s most advanced accelerators, the Blackwell-class B200 and B300, and the rack-scale GB300 NVL72 platform, which links 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into a single liquid-cooled system.

Supermicro, headquartered in San Jose, California, has been expanding aggressively into sovereign AI infrastructure worldwide. The company counts Telenor among its global ecosystem partners for sovereign AI and AI-RAN solutions, a relationship that analysts say creates a natural bridge to the Pakistani market through Telenor’s existing tie-up with Data Vault. In the wider region, Supermicro signed a USD 20 billion multi-year agreement with Saudi Arabia’s DataVolt in 2025 to build hyperscale AI campuses.

Whether Blackwell-class chips can ultimately be shipped to Pakistan will depend on US export authorizations, which are assessed separately from Data Vault’s existing GPU approvals.

Data Vault Pakistan is the country’s first AI-ready sovereign data center and GPU-as-a-Service provider. In December 2025, the company launched Pakistan’s first locally hosted sovereign AI cloud in collaboration with Telenor Pakistan, giving local enterprises in-country access to Nvidia enterprise-grade GPUs for the first time. The company says it has secured more than 3,000 GPUs through official Nvidia-approved channels after clearing strict technical, compliance, and financing checks required under US export-control rules — a notable feat given that Pakistan sits on the US restricted list for advanced chip exports.

Pakistan currently spends an estimated USD 700-800 million a year on foreign cloud and computing services, according to industry figures, spending that locally hosted infrastructure could retain within the country while keeping sensitive national data inside its borders.

Data Vault is no longer alone in the race. Gul Ahmed Energy Group’s Quantum Global Data Centre announced a USD 230 million Tier III data center in partnership with Huawei last month, expected to be operational in 2027, giving Pakistan parallel US-aligned and China-aligned infrastructure tracks.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026