Pakistan has found an unexpected use for the electricity it routinely leaves untapped: power thousands of Bitcoin rigs and AI servers.
Officials say roughly 2 gigawatts—about one-seventh of the country’s generation capacity—often sit idle, especially on cool winter nights when demand can plunge below 12 GW.
Instead of paying millions in “capacity charges” to keep underused plants on standby, the government now wants that surplus to crunch algorithms.
Under a program rolling out this year, aging thermal stations will be retrofitted to host crypto-mining farms and data centers focused on artificial-intelligence workloads.
The scheme turns wasted electrons into export-ready computing power and digital assets, creating a new revenue stream for the treasury.
Longer term, planners intend to feed the project with solar arrays, wind parks, and hydropower, bringing low-carbon energy into Pakistan’s budding digital economy.
If successful, the initiative could cut grid inefficiencies, lighten the financial load on power utilities, and vault the country into the fast-moving race for blockchain and AI innovation.
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