Pakistan has discovered an surprising use for the electrical energy it routinely leaves untapped: energy hundreds of Bitcoin rigs and AI servers.
Officers say roughly 2 gigawatts—about one-seventh of the nation’s technology capability—typically sit idle, particularly on cool winter nights when demand can plunge beneath 12 GW.
As a substitute of paying tens of millions in “capability fees” to maintain underused vegetation on standby, the federal government now needs that surplus to crunch algorithms.
Below a program rolling out this yr, growing older thermal stations will probably be retrofitted to host crypto-mining farms and information facilities targeted on artificial-intelligence workloads.
The scheme turns wasted electrons into export-ready computing energy and digital belongings, creating a brand new income stream for the treasury.
Long term, planners intend to feed the undertaking with photo voltaic arrays, wind parks, and hydropower, bringing low-carbon power into Pakistan’s budding digital economic system.
If profitable, the initiative might lower grid inefficiencies, lighten the monetary load on energy utilities, and vault the nation into the fast-moving race for blockchain and AI innovation.