Pakistan building Urdu AI model Buraq on sovereign compute, minister says
Pakistan is developing Buraq, a large language model trained on Urdu and regional languages, and is procuring sovereign compute capacity so that Pakistani data is processed inside the country, the Federal Minister for IT and Telecom said at the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul.
Speaking on a World Bank panel on digital government service delivery, the minister said the model and the public compute behind it form the AI layer of a programme resting on four foundations, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of IT on Wednesday. She argued that governments which skip those 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 first foundation is digital identity. The National Database and Registration Authority provides verified identity to more than 100 million Pakistanis, the minister said, now extended into a digital identity that authenticates citizens online and records and enforces consent. The second is payments, where the State Bank's Raast instant payment rail turns an AI model's identification of a qualifying household into delivery.
The third is data. WASL, described as the national exchange layer of the Digital Public Infrastructure stack built under the World Bank-supported Digital Economy Enhancement Project, lets institutions share data with every transaction authenticated, encrypted and logged. A citizen Super App and the National Open Data Ecosystem sit on top of that layer.
The fourth foundation is safeguards: the National Data Governance Policy sets a single rulebook for classifying, sharing, protecting and publishing public data, according to the ministry's account of the minister's remarks.
