The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MoITT) has received six applications from cloud service providers seeking accreditation under the government’s Cloud First Policy, the National Assembly was informed.
The information was shared in a written reply by Minister for IT and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja to a question raised by MNA Syeda Amnah Batool. The applications are currently under assessment by the ministry.
The minister told the House that MoITT has examined the potential use of Pakistan’s locally hosted Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cloud and Data Centre set up by Data Vault Pakistan.
The facility was launched in November in collaboration with Nvidia. She said the infrastructure, which includes sovereign AI, GPU-as-a-Service, and AI Cloud capabilities, could support government digital services while ensuring data residency, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance.
According to the reply, the initiative is aligned with Pakistan’s National AI Policy and Cloud First Policy. However, the minister clarified that MoITT has not been formally onboarded or approached for production workloads related to the AI Cloud and Data Centre. She added that Data Vault Pakistan has not yet submitted an application for accreditation.
Subject to government procedures, security clearances, and inter-ministerial consultation, the ministry may consider pilot projects and phased adoption of such infrastructure in the future.
The minister identified possible areas, including e-governance and digital public service platforms, cybersecurity initiatives such as Security Operations Centres (SOCs) and the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), secure government data hosting and analytics, sector-specific AI use cases, and public sector AI research and innovation.
The minister further informed the House that internationally, governments have adopted public-private partnership models for hosting sovereign digital and AI services.
Citing examples from the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and United Arab Emirates, she said these models show that sovereign AI infrastructure and global service provisioning can operate together under proper governance, security, and policy frameworks. She added that such infrastructure would contribute to Pakistan’s national AI compute capacity and broader policy objectives.