Pakistan is becoming one of the main suppliers of artificial-intelligence services in its region, the World Bank says. The same report warns that weak innovation and a thin base of Urdu-language data could hold the country back. The findings come from the bank’s October 2026 economic update for the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan (MENAAP), titled From Divide to Opportunity: AI, Jobs, and Growth.
A talent-led exporter
Pakistan and Egypt are among the world’s top five suppliers on major online work platforms, across more than 2,700 skill areas. The report links this to about 75,000 IT graduates a year and record ICT services exports of $4.6 billion in fiscal 2025-26. Pakistan also hosts the largest number of data centres in the region, alongside Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which lead on capacity.
The $1 billion plan
The bank describes Pakistan’s approach as a push for “AI sovereignty”: a home-grown ecosystem that serves national priorities. A $1 billion programme running to 2030 is meant to fund:
shared GPU infrastructure
a sovereign multilingual AI model
1,000 AI PhD scholarships
training for one million non-IT professionals
The national AI strategy also aims to train 200,000 people a year, including 3,000 postgraduate scholarships. That is the largest annual training goal among the strategies the report reviewed.
Where Pakistan lags
The report says Pakistan does well on digital infrastructure for its income level but poorly on innovation and economic integration. Only 3% of Pakistani firms reported product innovation and 1% process innovation. The averages for comparable countries are 23% and 14%. Language is another gap. Urdu makes up roughly 0.03% of web addresses in Common Crawl, one of the largest datasets used to train AI models. Arabic and Persian each make up about 0.7%. Less Urdu text means AI tools that serve Urdu speakers less well.
Opportunity and risk for workers
Pakistan’s reliance on freelance and outsourcing markets cuts both ways. The same online work that earns foreign exchange is exposed as AI begins to replace some outsourced tasks. The report also carries a less welcome finding. Pakistan accounts for about 48% of MENAAP’s people living on less than $3 a day. An economic adviser to the finance minister has called that figure misleading.
What to watch
Three things will decide whether Pakistan’s service talent becomes AI capacity or stays exposed to it: whether the $1 billion programme delivers real compute, whether it produces a usable Urdu-capable model, and whether the training numbers are met.