What opened. Karakoram-01 was inaugurated on 24 July by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif at Capital Smart City, on the motorway between Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Which of the two cities it sits in depends on the source: launch coverage and the operator’s own materials say Islamabad, while the Special Technology Zones Authority registers Sky47 inside the Capital Smart Technology Zone in Rawalpindi. ZTE puts the facility at 8.5MW of total power capacity, a figure Dawn also reported. “Largest” is the operator’s and the government’s claim; Pakistan has no public registry of comparable live capacity against which to test it, though the previous holder of the title, Jazz’s Digital Park, was reported at 3MW in 2022.
Who owns it. Sky47 is 60% owned by Mari Technologies, itself wholly owned by Mari Energies, whose own register is Fauji Foundation 40%, the government of Pakistan 20%, OGDCL 20% and the public 20%, with management control held by the Fauji Foundation. Mari’s transaction material attributes the remaining 40% of Sky47 to unnamed “other sponsors”; no filing reviewed identifies them.
Who built it. ZTE supplied the end-to-end data centre solution — electrical and mechanical infrastructure, cold-plate liquid cooling, prefabricated power modules — and says it completed the MEP deployment in eight months. Capital Smart City says it provided the site and led civil works. Sky47’s account of factory acceptance testing in China covered transformers, generators, chillers, busbars and low-voltage containerised units, naming ZTE, Carrier, Siemens and Cummins China among the suppliers.
What the power figures mean. ZTE describes 8.5MW as total power capacity. Mari separately records an 11kV IESCO grid connection of up to 5MW, energised on 15 March 2026. The published material does not explain how the two figures relate. The full power architecture, the commissioned backup design and the source of any capacity beyond the grid connection all remain undisclosed. So does the IT load, in the sense that matters: transaction counsel says the Islamabad and Karachi projects were each designed for a scalable IT load of 5MW, at a combined estimated cost of PKR50bn financed by a bank syndicate, while Sky47’s chief executive, Hassan Abbas, has been quoted putting Karakoram-01 at a 5.5MW IT load in a facility designed for 16MW. Abbas has also claimed a PUE below 1.5. Neither figure has been published with a methodology or an independent measurement, and the design figure and the operating figure are not the same thing.
What is certified. Uptime Institute’s public directory currently lists Karakoram 1, Phase 1 with a Tier III Certification of Design Documents — an assessment of the drawings rather than of the finished building. No constructed-facility certification and no Tier IV award is listed there. Sky47’s own announcement of the award carries Uptime’s description of it as a step toward certifying the constructed facility, which makes the widely repeated “Tier III/IV certified” shorthand an overstatement of what the directory shows.
What is running. Mari’s launch disclosure to the exchange describes the site as providing AI and high-performance computing services. Abbas says the facility is live and hosts localised large language models, and separately that colocation, security operations, cloud and GPU services are all running, with DeepSeek among the models deployed in-country. No accelerator vendor, model, count or cluster size has been made public, so the quantity of AI compute behind those services is not established. Two commercial names have surfaced: the payments company Haball, and ARYtech, which has announced a Sky47 Cloud partnership intended to keep critical workloads inside Pakistan. Nothing published maps either workload to this building specifically.
Where it sits. Karakoram-01 was not Pakistan’s first locally hosted AI cloud offering: Telenor and Data Vault launched an onshore service with GPU access in November 2025. Data Vault later signed a three-year sovereign AI services contract with the National Telecommunication Corporation specifying H200, B200 and A100 hardware — the disclosure Karakoram-01 has not made. Sky47 is also developing Indus-01 in Karachi, where its disclosed capacity and timetable have shifted: Mari’s 2025 transaction material targeted 5MW and commercial operation by 30 September 2026, while newer company-side material points to 8MW in 2027, and Sky47 says it has signed a development contract with ZTE for the site. Separately, Quantum Global has broken ground in Karachi on a facility planned at 80–100MW.
The dates to keep straight. Mari’s May 2025 filing projected commercial operation by 31 March 2026; the company later told Data Center Dynamics it expected completion by the end of 2025. A Sky47 cloud and AI platform went live on 15 January 2026, the grid feed was energised in March, and the ceremony came in July. Platform launch, grid energisation and inauguration are separate milestones. What remains undisclosed is the hardware inventory needed to quantify how much AI compute is actually installed: accelerator vendor, model, count and cluster size.
