Haq's Musings

Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://www.southasiainvestor.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ

Showing posts with label Data Center. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

US-Israeli Military Use of AI: Iran Targets Data Centers

As the war enters 12th day, both the Israeli and the US militaries are using AI to accelerate decision-making, analyzing vast amounts of intelligence data for generating targets, and optimizing logistics, shifting toward AI-enabled command structures to maintain battlefield superiority. Almost all major US AI data center operators have signed contracts to provide AI tools and services to both the Pentagon and the IDF. This arrangement has not gone unnoticed by the Iranians who are now targeting AI data centers in the Middle East.

Data Centers in Gulf States. Source: Bloomberg

Last week, three data centers operated by AmazonWeb Services (AWS), two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, were struck by Iranian drones or missiles. The attacks forced the facilities offline and led to service outages affecting banking, payments, delivery apps, and enterprise software across the region, according to a Fortune magazine report. The U.S. military uses AWS to run some of its workloads, including running Anthropic’s AI model Claude for some intelligence functions, and Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram that the Bahrain facility had been deliberately targeted “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.”

American hyperscalers like Amazon and Google have flocked to the Gulf states in recent years to take advantage of the region’s ample cheap energy, vast pools of investment capital, and real estate. Most of their operations are run through partnerships with local data center firms, and so it’s not always clear which ones are associated with US companies. Of the approximately 230 data centers that are built or in development in a half dozen Arab countries bordering the Gulf, only a handful are wholly owned and operated by a US tech giant, Amazon, according to researcher DC Byte. Three of those are the centers that were hit, according to Bloomberg.

With the growing use of AI in warfare, the digital infrastructure and the data centers are increasingly being targeted by belligerents. Data centers are sprawling, visible complexes dependent on exposed infrastructure—such as cooling units, diesel generators, and gas turbines—that can be disabled without a direct hit on the servers themselves. “If you knock out some of the chillers you can take them fully offline,” Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Financial Times. The threat of multiple data centers coming under attack at once during wartime is forcing companies to rethink their strategies, including securing data centers against missiles or drones, according to Bloomberg.

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Pakistan Gets its First AI Data Center

Data Vault and Telenor Pakistan have launched the nation's first dedicated AI data center in Karachi. It is designed to support startups, researchers, and government agencies with high-performance computing and GPU-as-a-service offerings. It is equipped with more than 3,000 Nvidia's highest performance H100 and H200 GPUs for which the Trump Administration issued export licenses. These GPUs cost from $40,000 to $60,000 each, making the Nvidia chips the biggest chunk of the investment made in this AI data center. Other data centers in Pakistan also support AI workloads but this new data center in Karachi is specially designed for AI. It puts the country on a short list of only a handful of nations with locally hosted AI data centers. Pakistanis rank among the world's top five users of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, securing the fourth spot among 21 nations surveyed by the Schwartz Reisman Institute.

The local hosting of data in Pakistan ensures data sovereignty to comply with national data protection and security standards. It also achieves faster response times for queries. The data center runs entirely on solar power, making it a green data center solution. Additionally, the government of Pakistan has allocated 2,000 MW of power from the national grid for AI data centers.

One of the objectives of locally hosted AI data centers is to support Urdu language models (LLMs) trained to help Pakistani consumers who wish to use AI chatbots in local languages. A number of Urdu LLMs have already been developed in the country, including Alif and UrduLlama, both based on the open-source Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct architecture. Another model named UrduGPT is described as Pakistan's own large language model, UrduGPT is fine-tuned specifically for Urdu and regional languages of Pakistan using local datasets and cultural semantics to ensure relevance for native speakers.

Currently, Pakistan has 27 data centers located in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, operated by PTCL, Multinet, and Cybernet. More are being built. Zong, a local mobile phone service operator owned by China Mobile, is building AI-driven cloud infrastructure in Pakistan. Indus Cloud and Huawei have a strategic partnership that aims to launch a next-generation cloud data center, incorporating energy-efficient Huawei technology. XDS and Al Nahal IT Park are partnering to build a liquid-cooled data center at the Al Nahal IT Park in Sindh province. Mari Petroleum Company Limited (MPCL), the state-owned oil and gas firm, is diversifying by forming a subsidiary, Mari Technologies, to build Tier III and Tier IV data centers in Islamabad and Karachi, with the 5MW Islamabad facility set for completion by early 2026.