Pakistan’s broadband, electricity gaps constrain AI ambitions: report

A World Bank report on the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region says Pakistan's weak mobile broadband penetration and uneven electricity access are holding back the infrastructure needed for wide use of artificial intelligence. The October 2026 MENAAP Economic Update places Pakistan among eight economies with fewer mobile broadband subscriptions than their income levels would suggest. Only 95.7% of Pakistan's population has electricity access, placing the country among five MENAAP economies below 99.5%.

Set against these gaps, the report highlights Pakistan's push into AI, with ICT services exports reaching $4.6 billion in FY2025-26 and 75,000 IT graduates produced each year. A $1 billion programme through 2030 would cover shared GPU infrastructure, a sovereign multilingual model, 1,000 AI PhD scholarships and training for one million professionals outside IT. The World Bank also notes that Urdu forms only 0.03% of the URLs in Common Crawl's July 2026 archive, a shortfall the Bank says can lower the quality of AI outputs for Urdu speakers.

The World Bank says lower-cost AI tools built for basic phones, SMS or intermittent power could offer one route around connectivity limits, and notes Pakistan is already building such applications. The report places Pakistan between a large pool of tech talent and gaps in broadband, power, localisation and readiness that could restrict AI uptake across the economy.