Exclusive: Pakistan moves towards sovereign AI
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios
The Pakistani government is making moves to lower the barrier for its entrepreneurs to build AI-native applications without relying on Western cloud hyperscalers.
Why it matters: If successful, the effort could serve as a model for other emerging economies looking to jumpstart AI-based growth while keeping sensitive data stored within national networks and out of reach of foreign adversaries.
Driving the news: The Pakistan Digital Authority signed a memorandum of understanding with the Switzerland-based Dfinity Foundation on Monday.
- The move will make Dfinity's Caffeine — an AI platform that allows people to build software applications using natural-language prompts, significantly reducing the need for traditional coding expertise — available to Pakistan's large and growing population of entrepreneurs.
The big picture: The partnership also reflects a broader push by governments to establish some degree of data sovereignty.
- Many countries remain heavily reliant on tech providers in the U.S. and China, which have the scale and resources needed to handle massive volumes of data flowing across their networks.
- By relying on Dfinity's technology, Pakistan aims to offer entrepreneurs and government agencies a way to build applications that don't depend on centralized cloud providers to store and route their data.
Between the lines: To enable the partnership, Pakistan is building its own subnet — a dedicated, country-specific slice of Dfinity's Internet Computer network — rather than relying on services such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.
- Instead, The Internet Computer is a blockchain-based, distributed cloud system in which applications run across multiple independent servers, rather than inside a single centralized data center.
- That decentralized design makes it harder for attackers or foreign governments to tamper with data or quietly alter applications, because no single provider controls the entire system, Dfinity Foundation founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams told Axios in an exclusive interview.
Threat level: Williams warned that AI-enabled attacks increase the risk of large-scale failures in centralized cloud environments, where a single breach or outage can cascade across services.
- Subnets built on the Internet Computer protocol are designed to be more resilient by replicating the same data across multiple servers in different locations, instead of relying on one central point of storage.
The intrigue: Pakistan is a burgeoning entrepreneurship hub. According to a 2023 census, 95% of businesses in the country have fewer than 10 employees.
What's next: The Pakistan Digital Authority plans to use the partnership to build a national messenger application "enabling private, verifiable communications," according to the press release.
- Dfinity will also provide hardware to help Pakistan stand up its subnet, along with 1,000 licenses for Caffeine intended to support application development across government, education, and entrepreneurship.
Go deeper: Inside Qatar's bid for AI sovereignty
