Pakistan's Federal Minister for IT and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja introduced Buraq, a state-funded Urdu artificial-intelligence model, on October 22 during a World Bank summit in Seoul. She said the system will keep all Pakistani data within national borders.
The model is designed to understand and produce text in Urdu as well as other regional languages. Urdu currently represents only 0.03% of the global web content collected by Common Crawl, meaning most existing AI tools perform poorly with the language. Consequently, the government opted to develop its own model from the ground up.
Khawaja also presented the initiative at the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026, which ran from October 19 to 22 in Seoul, and noted that Pakistan became the first nation to sign the Digital and AI Compact at the event. She characterized AI as "the last layer, not the first" of digital development.
To back Buraq, Pakistan intends to establish sovereign computing capacity so that data processing remains domestic. The state has earmarked $1 billion in funding through 2030 for AI, regulatory reforms and public-sector AI projects, including deployments in welfare, healthcare and tax systems. The country also recently rolled out its first local AI cloud via a partnership between Telenor Pakistan and Data Vault Pakistan.
The minister outlined four digital foundations that Buraq will leverage: NADRA's digital identity system covering over 100 million Pakistanis, the State Bank's Raast instant-payment platform, and the national data exchange WASL that secures data sharing among government agencies.
Khawaja emphasized that AI should assist people in making decisions rather than replace them, and she said human oversight will remain central to all AI systems. Pakistan's National Data Governance Policy already defines rules for storing, sharing and protecting government data.
Because Buraq is still under development, no website or public demonstration exists, and no release date or technical specifications have been disclosed.
