KARACHI:
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif recently inaugurated the Sky47 Karakoram-01 in Islamabad, hailed as the country’s largest AI data centre and cloud computing facility. Sources claim that this move will usher in a new digital economy for Pakistan, which has operated as a predominantly agrarian nation. And now, Sky47 is developing another Indus-01 AI data centre in Port Qasim, Karachi, which aims for completion around September of this year.
It is terrifying to see how desperately Pakistan wants to catch up to its contemporaries in the AI bubble, despite globally remaining in the top 5 in multidimensional poverty and the 15th most water-insecure country. Karachi, especially, is a growing metropolis and financial capital of the country, which already struggles with municipal issues, road operations and a longstanding water crisis.
Yet, instead of turning our focus to the more pressing matters at ground-level, we compete in a race which will inevitably destroy our own dwindling resources. We are already witnessing the surge of falling water levels due to AI centres in countries like the United States. Michigan, Ohio and Texas all report alarming decline in the Great Lakes, where such centres require gallons upon gallons of groundwater 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 which is already falling apart, we need to have serious dialogue about infrastructure governance regarding AI centres in the landscape of water scarcity, and how we can actually make a digital economy sustainable for generations to come.
Saba Kashif
Karachi
