LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has returned home after completing a four-day visit to China during which Alibaba Cloud expressed interest in investing in and cooperating with the province’s information technology sector.
The chief minister met a high-level delegation of the company, which welcomed the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Punjab.
The meeting covered artificial-intelligence-based governance in Punjab and the application of AI to public services, agriculture, healthcare, socio-economic programmes and climate forecasting. The possibility of an artificial intelligence strategic partnership for public services was also examined. Officials of Alibaba Cloud Group praised Punjab’s AI-based governance initiatives.
Li Jiaping, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Group, briefed the meeting on the company’s operations and technology initiatives. Describing the signing of the MoU with Punjab as a welcome development, he said artificial intelligence can assist in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, and disclosed that discussions are under way regarding the establishment of a data centre in Pakistan.
Matters relating to small and medium enterprises for overseas Pakistanis were also raised.
Maryam Nawaz told the delegation that Punjab’s governance system is being integrated with artificial intelligence, and that the province is acting on a policy of adopting AI and other modern technology today rather than tomorrow.
She said Punjab is building the world’s largest public-sector cancer hospital and has become the first province to establish an artificial intelligence institute. The idea of teaching artificial intelligence to children in government schools, she said, came from observing students in Beijing. Chinese cooperation in AI and wider IT technology would be welcomed.
Punjab, she said, ranks fourth among provinces in terms of its young and skilled workforce and holds the position of a leader in the digital economy. Not only government officers and officials but also members of the provincial cabinet have received AI training.
Punjab Education Minister Ali Mustafa Dar told the meeting that AI education has been made compulsory in the province from Grade One, and that artificial intelligence is already in use at the Safe City Authority and in agriculture, health and other sectors.
During the four-day trip, the chief minister attended a range of significant events and visited technology institutions. She participated in China’s National Big Data Centre Expo, where she reviewed developments in modern technology, digital systems and big data. She also visited Huawei’s headquarters, where she was briefed on modern technology and digital solutions.
The substantive item in this visit is the data centre, not the memorandum. MoUs of this kind are non-binding statements of intent and Pakistan has accumulated a great many of them; a data centre is capital expenditure with a physical location, a power connection and a regulatory footprint.
That is also where the difficulty lies. Hyperscale data centres are among the most power-hungry and water-intensive facilities in modern industry, and they require uninterrupted supply. Punjab is currently managing load shedding measured in gigawatts. Any serious data-centre proposal will need a dedicated generation or captive-power arrangement, and the terms of that arrangement — who pays, at what tariff, with what guarantees — are the questions that will decide whether this progresses beyond discussion.
There is a second issue the announcements do not address. A foreign-operated data centre hosting Punjab government workloads raises data-sovereignty questions that Pakistan’s legal framework handles poorly; the Personal Data Protection Bill has been in draft for years. If citizen health, agricultural and Safe City data is to be processed on such infrastructure, the enabling legislation should precede the servers, not follow them.
-Reported by Rao Dilshad
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