Telenor Pakistan has struck a strategic partnership with Data Vault, which claims to be the country’s only AI factory facility, to pitch an ‘AI-ready sovereign cloud’ joint offering to the B2B sector in Pakistan.
The partners are offering the country’s enterprises secure access to locally hosted GPU-enabled computing infrastructure, something that, according to the partners, hasn’t been available to Pakistan’s business sector until now.
Business users will be able to undertake AI training, inference workloads and data processing, as well as develop large language models (LLMs) for Urdu and regional languages, within the country’s borders using Data Vault’s AI factory infrastructure, which will be available on a GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) basis.
“Data Vault Pakistan is thrilled to announce a strategic alliance with Telenor Pakistan, bringing sovereign GPU-as-a-service and managed AI platforms to enterprises across the country,” the company announced. “As Pakistan’s first AI datacentre and sovereign AI cloud, we’re enabling Telenor to deliver secure, locally hosted, Nvidia-accelerated AI infrastructure for sectors like finance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom and public services, ensuring full data residency and compliance,” it added.
According to the partners, the services comply fully with healthcare data laws and emerging national AI safety guidelines, as well as with the regulatory frameworks created by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and State Bank of Pakistan.
Mehwish Salman Ali, CEO at Data Vault Pakistan, stated: “Today we are turning sovereign, high-performance computing into a national capability. By weaving Data Vault Cloud into Telenor Pakistan’s enterprise portfolio, we are giving every organisation a secure, local path from idea to inference – without sending data abroad. This is how Pakistan moves from consuming AI to producing it.”
Telenor and Data Vault reportedly plan to jointly develop industry-specific AI applications, focusing on fintech, healthcare, telecom automation, agri-tech, and smart governance.
Such developments will be in focus during TelecomTV’s Digital Sovereignty Forum in London on 3 December – if you can make it, come and join in, or watch out for on-demand recordings of the sessions.
The announcement comes just as Telenor Pakistan, which has about 42.4 million mobile customers, is set to finally become part of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), which agreed to acquire Telenor Pakistan in late 2023 for about $500m. PTCL has about 27.2 million mobile customers via its Ufone mobile operation.
The Competition Commission of Pakistan recently granted approval for the deal and PTCL’s shareholders have also approved the transaction, leaving only the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to give the green light.
Once completed, PTCL will be the country’s second-largest mobile operator with about 71.6 million customers for a market share of about 35.5%, second only to Jazz (with about 72.6 million customers, 37% market share) and ahead of Zong (52 million, 26.5% market share).
Source: https://www.telecomtv.com/content/ai/telenor-pakistan-teams-up-for-sovereign-ai-54406/amp/
