According to The Express Tribune, Pakistan is building Buraq, its own large language model trained on Urdu and regional languages, and procuring sovereign compute capacity so that Pakistani data is processed inside the country. The federal minister for IT and telecom announced this at the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul.
A programme on four foundations
According to a Ministry of IT statement issued on Wednesday, the minister told a World Bank panel that Buraq and the public compute behind it form the AI layer of a programme resting on four foundations: digital identity, payments, data exchange and safeguards.
NADRA, Raast and WASL
The statement says NADRA provides verified identity to more than 100 million Pakistanis, now extended into a digital identity that authenticates citizens online and records consent. The State Bank's Raast instant payment system delivers money once an AI model identifies a qualifying household. WASL, the national data exchange built under the World Bank-supported Digital Economy Enhancement Project, lets institutions share data with every transaction authenticated, encrypted and logged, while the National Data Governance Policy sets a single rulebook for public data.
'AI is the last layer, not the first'
The minister said governments that skip these foundations end up with pilots that never scale and systems citizens do not trust, adding that AI is the last layer, not the first. The report did not give a date for when Buraq will be available to the public.