Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : President Donald Trump has issued a blunt warning to American communities resisting artificial-intelligence data centers: reject them, he argued, and they risk becoming “backwards and poor.” In his August 31 statement, Trump presented data centers as essential infrastructure for economic prosperity, technological leadership and competition with China. His language was confrontational, but the strategic concern behind it deserves serious attention.
Artificial intelligence and robotics are likely to be among the most consequential technologies of the coming decades. The countries controlling the computing power required to train and operate advanced AI systems will gain economic influence, scientific capabilities and national-security advantages. Data centers are therefore becoming to the digital age what ports, railways, power stations and industrial zones were to earlier periods of development.
China recognized this reality early and began constructing not merely individual data centers but an entire computing ecosystem. Its “East Data, West Computing” programme connects demand in the populous and commercially developed east with land, energy and computing facilities in western regions. By mid-2024, China had invested more than $6 billion directly in eight national computing hubs, with the wider investment stimulated by those hubs exceeding $28 billion. The clusters contained more than 1.95 million server racks.
China’s approach incorporates electricity generation, high-capacity transmission networks, fibre-optic connectivity, cooling systems, equipment manufacturing and workforce development. Five of its eight national computing hubs are in western China, where comparatively inexpensive land and abundant wind and solar resources can reduce operating costs. Computing requirements generated in eastern technology centres can consequently be transferred to facilities thousands of kilometres away.
With a futuristic approach, China built capacity ahead of immediate demand, while setting aside the cost of underunderutilization in the initial stage. This strategy worked and now these 10 principal national data-center clusters had an overall utilization rate of approximately 63 percent in early 2024. This encouraged China to improve national scheduling, connectivity and coordination. By 2025, China reportedly had 10.43 million standard computing racks in use, while its major hubs were increasingly devoted to intelligent computing.
China is, in effect, making a long-term wager: capacity that appears underused today will become strategically indispensable as demand for AI services accelerates. The International Energy Agency estimates that Chinese data centers consumed more than 100 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 and that their consumption could double by 2027. China can accommodate such growth because it has simultaneously expanded power generation. At the end of 2025, its installed solar capacity exceeded 1,200 gigawatts and its wind capacity reached approximately 640 gigawatts.
The United States possesses superior companies, advanced semiconductors, enormous capital and many of the world’s best AI researchers. Nevertheless, it is encountering a different problem: translating technological leadership into physical infrastructure.
Data-center projects are facing resistance from communities worried about electricity prices, water consumption, industrial noise, loss of agricultural land and tax concessions offered to wealthy technology companies. Residents also question the employment benefits. A hyperscale facility can create thousands of temporary construction jobs, but its highly automated operation may provide relatively few permanent positions.
These concerns cannot simply be dismissed as hostility to progress. U.S. data centers consumed approximately 4.4 percent of national electricity in 2023, and researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projected that their share could reach between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. A 2026 analysis identified at least 46 American AI data-center projects delayed or cancelled following community opposition. The backlash has crossed party lines and encouraged municipalities to introduce moratoriums or stricter conditions.
Trump is correct that rejecting digital infrastructure indiscriminately could weaken American competitiveness. Local communities are equally justified in demanding that private companies should not transfer their electricity, water and environmental costs to ordinary citizens. The workable solution is a new social contract: developers must finance required grid upgrades, disclose resource requirements, reuse water wherever possible and generate or procure additional electricity.
Requiring companies to build dedicated generation can protect households and even add surplus power to the grid. It will, however, increase capital costs. American AI services could become more expensive if every project must separately negotiate land, power, water and local approval while Chinese competitors operate within coordinated national industrial plans.
Europe faces comparable constraints. Its difficulty is not necessarily an absolute shortage of electricity but insufficient grid capacity in established data-center centres such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin. The European Investment Bank estimates Europe’s installed data-center capacity at about 11 gigawatts, with 15–20 gigawatts in the development pipeline. In Dublin, grid pressure produced a de facto restriction on new connections and requirements for on-site generation. Planning procedures, high energy costs and environmental rules can further slow construction.
This combination creates an opportunity for countries able to offer politically acceptable sites, reliable energy and competitive costs. Pakistan should consider positioning itself as one such destination.
Pakistan possesses important advantages: a large and young population, an English-speaking technology workforce, relatively inexpensive land and labour, growing digital demand and a geographic position connecting South Asia, Central Asia, China and the Middle East. Its government has already adopted a Cloud First Policy and approved a National Artificial Intelligence Policy. A domestic data-center industry could improve cloud availability, strengthen data sovereignty, develop specialized engineering skills and attract foreign investment.
Nevertheless, Pakistan cannot sell ambition alone. Electricity is its central challenge. Data centers require continuous, high-quality power; outages of even seconds can be costly. Pakistan should therefore identify dedicated “digital infrastructure zones” where investors can construct captive solar, wind, hydro, gas or nuclear-supported generation, combined with batteries and reliable grid connections. Any surplus electricity could be supplied to neighbouring communities under transparent agreements.
Water policy must be equally rigorous. Pakistan is already water-stressed, so offering unlimited cheap water would be economically and environmentally irresponsible. Facilities should be directed toward locations where they can employ closed-loop cooling, treated wastewater, air cooling or other low-water technologies. Projects must undergo credible environmental review and guarantee that household and agricultural supplies will not be displaced.
The government must also establish dependable data-protection rules, cybersecurity standards, tax certainty, streamlined approvals and international connectivity through diversified fibre and submarine-cable routes. Pakistan must compete through reliability and sound policy—not merely low wages or weak regulation. Security, political continuity and contractual enforcement will matter as much as land prices.
The objective should be a negotiated partnership with companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and major international data-center operators. Pakistan could offer prepared sites and coordinated approvals in return for locally generated power, workforce training, university partnerships, environmental safeguards and minimum domestic investment commitments.
China’s experience demonstrates that successful computing infrastructure depends on an ecosystem, not a warehouse filled with servers. The American and European experience demonstrates that ignoring local costs produces resistance and delay. Pakistan should learn from both: plan with China’s strategic horizon while protecting communities through transparent and enforceable standards.
The opportunity is real, but it will not remain open indefinitely. Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology, energy authorities, provincial governments and investment agencies should jointly prepare a credible national data-center strategy and begin presenting bankable projects to global investors. If Pakistan acts quickly and responsibly, the worldwide struggle to accommodate AI infrastructure could become a powerful source of technology, skills, electricity investment and long-term national prosperity.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Mark Carney’s remarkable address at Davos earlier this year was more than a Canadian response to a changing world. It amounted to an intellectual challenge to the assumptions upon which much of the post-war international system was built.
His central proposition was unsettling: the world is experiencing not merely a transition but a “rupture,” in which great powers like the United States increasingly use tariffs, finance, supply chains and economic integration as instruments of leverage. Countries that continue believing accommodation will automatically purchase security may therefore be living inside what Carney called a “pleasant fiction.”
For decades, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and many developing countries organized significant parts of their security and economic policies around an American-led international system. The problem was not the partnership itself. The danger arose when partnership became dependency, dependency encouraged complacency, and complacency was mistaken for permanent security.
Europe offers perhaps the clearest warning. For decades it relied heavily upon American military power while concentrating its own resources on economic and social development. Yet Washington is now explicitly pressing Europeans to assume greater responsibility for defending their continent. More dramatically, European governments were confronted with American pressure over Greenland and tariff threats against allies that resisted Washington’s position. Britain publicly called such tariffs against allies “wrong,” while European leaders insisted that Denmark and Greenland’s sovereignty was non-negotiable.
This is precisely the kind of contradiction Carney wants middle powers to recognize. An alliance can remain valuable without being treated as an insurance policy against every future contingency. Friendship between states is ultimately governed by interests, and interests change.
Canada learned the same lesson with exceptional severity. Few relationships appeared more permanent than that between Canada and the United States. Their economies became deeply integrated, their defense structures intertwined and their border one of the most economically consequential in the world. Yet Canada is currently confronting substantial American tariffs and escalating commercial confrontation. In August, Washington imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods after negotiations failed; Canada subsequently prepared equivalent retaliation.
Carney’s response has therefore been not to sever relations with America but to reduce Canada’s vulnerability to any single relationship. Canada is seeking new trade arrangements, investing in strategic industries and building coalitions with other middle powers. His government says Canada is pursuing links between the European Union and the Trans-Pacific partnership that could encompass 1.5 billion people.
The lesson travels far beyond the Atlantic. Middle Eastern states historically dependent upon American security guarantees must also reassess what sovereignty requires in an era when regional wars, sanctions and great-power confrontation can impose enormous costs upon countries that did not design those conflicts.
Pakistan and many developing economies face a different vulnerability. Their dependence may be financial rather than military: external financing, international institutions, export markets, technology, energy or foreign investment can narrow the space available for genuinely independent decision-making. The larger truth is more important: excessive dependence on any external center of power creates leverage, and leverage can eventually become coercion.
Here China provides an instructive contrast, though not a flawless model. China spent decades building the economic, industrial, technological and military foundations that allow it to negotiate with Washington from a fundamentally different position. It developed enormous manufacturing capacity, infrastructure, foreign-exchange resources, technological capabilities and increasingly sophisticated armed forces. It did not achieve autonomy by isolating itself; paradoxically, it used global integration to accumulate national strength.
Consequently, when Washington pressures Beijing, China possesses instruments with which to respond. It means sovereignty becomes more credible when backed by capability.
Iran demonstrates another, much harsher version of strategic autonomy. Whatever judgment one makes about its government or policies, decades of sanctions and confrontation forced Tehran to develop a considerable capacity to operate without the degree of Western economic and security integration enjoyed by many regional states. The costs to Iranian society have been substantial. Yet its experience illustrates the same principle from another direction: independence has a price, but dependence carries risks of its own.
The objective for other countries should therefore not be to become China or Iran. Nor should they simply replace Washington with Beijing. Changing masters is not strategic autonomy.
The real objective should be diversified sovereignty. A country that depends upon one state for defense, another single market for exports, one financial network for transactions, imported energy for survival and foreign technology for critical infrastructure possesses formal sovereignty but limited strategic freedom.
Carney captures this brutally when describing middle powers negotiating individually with a hegemon: they negotiate from weakness, compete to become the most accommodating and eventually perform sovereignty while accepting subordination. That observation should resonate across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Countries must begin measuring national strength differently. Military capability matters, but so do food security, energy, technological capacity, industrial production, critical minerals, financial resilience, educated human capital and diversified trade. A nation unable to feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, Carney warns, has few options when international rules cease protecting it.
Building these capabilities inevitably demands sacrifice. Governments must invest in education, research, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, energy, agriculture, artificial intelligence and defense. They must mobilize their human resources instead of allowing talent to remain underdeveloped. Above all, citizens must understand that sovereignty cannot indefinitely be outsourced while independence is simultaneously expected.
But no middle power can realistically reproduce the scale of China or the United States. That is why Carney’s second prescription is as important as the first: middle powers must combine their strength.
His memorable warning that countries absent from the negotiating table risk finding themselves “on the menu” captures the predicament perfectly. Great powers possess the markets, militaries and financial leverage to act alone. Most other states do not. Their answer must therefore be coalitions—on trade, technology, critical minerals, energy, finance, maritime security and defense—constructed around common interests rather than blind allegiance.
This is where his invocation of Václav Havel acquires extraordinary relevance. Systems of domination survive not simply because the powerful impose them but because others participate in rituals they privately know to be false. Carney’s metaphorical instruction to middle powers is therefore to stop performing the ritual—to “take the sign out of the window.” The wiser conclusion is: never make another country indispensable to your survival.
Donald Trump’s transactional approach has merely made this structural reality harder to ignore. Alliances, markets and security guarantees remain useful, but none substitutes for national capability. Protection granted by another power can be renegotiated; market access can be restricted; financial infrastructure can become leverage; yesterday’s strategic assumption can become tomorrow’s vulnerability.
The choice confronting middle powers is therefore not between America and China, East and West, submission and isolation. It is between dependency and strategic autonomy.
Build strength at home. Diversify abroad. Cooperate with others without surrendering decision-making. Defend international law consistently. Develop citizens capable of accepting the costs of genuine independence. And never confuse the favor of the powerful with permanent security.
That is the deeper significance of Carney’s speech. The era in which countries could outsource their strategic destiny and call the resulting comfort sovereignty is fading. The nations that recognize this early will endure the rupture with dignity. Those that continue competing for the favor of great powers may eventually discover the cruelest truth of international politics:
A security umbrella belongs to the country holding the umbrella—and it can close it whenever it chooses.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Human civilization has always been built around struggle. People have labored to secure food, shelter and safety. They have pursued education, endured hardship and developed skills not only to survive, but also to gain dignity, recognition and self-actualization. Alongside this material journey has run a spiritual one: the search for meaning and purpose beyond physical comfort. For most people, however, earning a livelihood has consumed the greater part of life.
Elon Musk now asks us to imagine a radical departure from that history. In a recent conversation with Joe Rogan, he described a “benign scenario” in which artificial intelligence and robotics generate sustainable abundance and a “universal high income.” Work would become optional, poverty could disappear, and every person could have access to excellent medical care and virtually all desired goods and services. Rogan called it an ideal socialist utopia—ironically produced not by a workers’ revolution, but by advanced capitalist technology.
The idea sounds extraordinary, yet its underlying logic is simple. If intelligent machines can perform most physical and cognitive tasks faster, more accurately and at lower cost than human beings, the productive capacity of the economy could expand enormously. Humanoid robots could work in factories, construct roads and buildings, handle cargo at ports, cultivate farms, drive vehicles, maintain infrastructure and perform dangerous jobs without fatigue. AI systems could manage offices, logistics, design, accounting and countless other digital operations.
Musk has argued that highly productive robots could multiply economic output many times over. Operating around the clock, they could produce more food, housing, medicine and consumer goods at lower cost. Human beings would no longer need to exhaust themselves merely to put food on the table. A singer could devote life to music, a researcher to discovery, a parent to family, and a spiritually inclined person to reflection and service. Work might continue, but as a choice rather than a condition of survival.
This is the attractive face of sustainable abundance. It could also reduce many social pressures associated with deprivation. Financial desperation contributes to theft, exploitation and some forms of violence. Safer autonomous transport could sharply reduce accidents caused by fatigue, intoxication and human error. Precision agriculture and automated supply systems could limit waste and improve food security. Competition over scarce resources, a recurring source of domestic conflict and international rivalry, might also become less intense.
But technology does not distribute its own benefits. That is the decisive weakness in every effortless version of this dream. A billion robots may produce unprecedented wealth, but who will own the robots, the AI models, the energy systems and the data on which they depend? If ownership remains concentrated among a handful of corporations and technologically dominant countries, abundance at the level of production could coexist with extreme scarcity for everyone else. Factories can overflow with goods while people remain poor if they lack income, entitlement or political power.
Universal high income, therefore, cannot arise from automation alone. It would require a new social contract governing ownership and distribution. Citizens might receive an AI dividend, hold shares in national automation funds, or gain guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, education, energy and digital services. Tax systems may have to shift from labor toward the returns generated by automated capital. Otherwise, workers could lose wages and purchasing power long before abundance becomes broad enough to rescue them.
Musk himself has warned that the transition may involve considerable trauma and disruption. Digital and office-based occupations are especially exposed because AI can already perform many computer-based tasks, while complex physical work will generally take longer to automate. The road to a post-work society may therefore pass through unemployment, anxiety and political instability. Promising eventual prosperity will not satisfy families who lose their livelihoods during the transition. Governments must prepare protections before disruption reaches its full force, not after social damage has become irreversible.
There is also the profound question of meaning. Employment is not merely a mechanism for paying bills. It provides routine, identity, community and a sense of contribution. Freedom from compulsory labor could release immense creativity, but it could also produce loneliness and purposelessness if society fails to develop new sources of belonging. Education would have to shift from preparing people for jobs toward cultivating judgment, creativity, character and civic responsibility. Human worth must no longer be measured by salary, yet neither should passive consumption become the purpose of life.
Nor would abundance automatically eliminate crime, war, government or courts. Human conflict is driven not only by material need, but also by power, ideology, fear, jealousy, identity and ambition. Even a wealthy world would need institutions to protect rights, settle disputes and prevent powerful actors from controlling technology against the public interest. AI may improve administration, but handing all authority to algorithms could create surveillance and domination rather than freedom. Human judgment, democratic accountability and law would remain essential.
The greatest danger is that the developing world may enter this new age as a customer rather than a participant. Countries such as Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, along with nations across Africa, Asia and Latin America, cannot afford to watch from the sidelines while others control the infrastructure of intelligence. They must invest urgently in education, computing capacity, reliable energy, robotics, research and local-language AI. They should also cooperate regionally, share scientific resources and negotiate international rules that prevent a permanent technological caste system between nations.
Sustainable abundance is therefore neither fantasy nor destiny. AI and robotics may make it technically possible to liberate humanity from much of its compulsory labor, but only political wisdom can make that liberation universal. The real challenge is not simply teaching machines to produce more. It is ensuring that the wealth they produce belongs, in some meaningful measure, to all humanity.
Musk’s vision of sustainable abundance should therefore be welcomed not as a fool’s dream, but as a serious and achievable direction for humanity. It comes from no ordinary dreamer, but from an innovator who has repeatedly transformed seemingly impossible ideas into working realities—from electric vehicles and autonomous mobility to reusable rockets, space exploration and Starlink’s global communications network.
His record does not guarantee that every prediction will materialize exactly as imagined, but it gives the world compelling reason to take this vision seriously. Rather than resisting it or dismissing it with competing speculation, governments, scientists and technology leaders should study what Musk has achieved, invest in their own innovators and create many more minds capable of pursuing equally audacious solutions.
If this endeavor gathers global momentum, AI, robotics and sustainable energy could help build a cleaner and more peaceful world—one with less poverty, crime, conflict and competition over scarce resources, and with greater space for creativity, family, service and spiritual growth. Humanity should not fear such a future; it should begin preparing, cooperating and innovating to make sustainable abundance a shared reality for present and coming generations.