Karachi's Quiet Data Brokers Are Fueling South Asia's AI Boom
By Syed John
Railway manifests and utility logs are worth more than gold when you're training regional AI.
In Saddar you can buy anything, including anonymized datasets that make Bangalore's AI teams salivate. Railway manifests, anonymous utility readings, call-center transcripts—all scrubbed, packaged, and exported under the radar. Pakistani agencies generate terabytes daily but have no unified policy on monetization, so third-party 'consultants' fill the gap.
These brokers aren't villains; they're translators. They take messy civic data, run it through AWS anonymizers, and ship it to startups trying to forecast everything from monsoon blackouts to fintech defaults. India, ironically, purchases Pakistani datasets because inter-state data sharing at home is a bureaucratic nightmare.
If Islamabad recognized this as a legitimate export industry instead of pretending it doesn't exist, Karachi could become the Luxembourg of South Asian data—regulated, taxed, and incredibly profitable. Until then, the AI race will run on smuggled CSV files.