In January 2026, a subtle adjustment was made by the U.S. Commerce Department that was not noticed by the public. They altered the export rules for NVIDIA’s H200 chips and AMD’s comparable AI hardware bound for China, moving from an automatic denial to a case-by-case system tied to security checks and US supply guarantees. On paper, it looked like a door opening, an opportunity. What actually happened was different: shipments got stuck for months while agencies argued over the fine print. It was a small decision of bureaucracy, but it revealed something bigger than this. A handful of governments now decide who gets access to tools that run artificial intelligence, and Pakistan is not in that room, and it actually never has been. To understand what this thing really means for a country like ours, it helps to trace the story backward, step by step.
Just weeks before that, in December 2025, the same story unfolded in reverse. The US briefly allowed chip sales to China, then pulled back within weeks. That flip-flop matters, because it shows how quickly these terms can change and how little control a country like Pakistan has over any of it. Decisions made in Washington or Beijing decide what technology reaches South Asia, and on what conditions. Pakistan just waits to find out.
Rewind to 2022 and 2023, and this same struggle was already playing out, just under a different name. Washington introduced sweeping restrictions on advanced chips, memory, and manufacturing equipment, eventually affecting more than a hundred countries. Pakistan was one of them, at least indirectly, since nearly everything it uses in AI runs on hardware or cloud systems built somewhere else. The country does not manufacture a single advanced chip. It doesn’t train frontier models. What it does have is a large, young population that’s increasingly and dangerously relying on Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT and CoChatGPT, one of which is built, hosted, or governed anywhere near Pakistan’s borders.
So, when the US and China renegotiate chip access between themselves, Pakistan is rarely part of that conversation. It’s just something that usually happens downstream, later, without much say in it.
Trace it back further, to 2013, and Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed how much of the world’s data was already moving through a small number of powerful intelligence networks, long before the time when artificial intelligence became something people started talking about at the dinner table. For a country like Pakistan, which even now has limited domestic data infrastructure, this was an early sign that data had become something that is worth fighting over. It just was not a mere fight Pakistan had the tools to join.
If you follow this thread all the way back to where it originally starts, you end up in Berlin, 1884, watching European powers carve up a continent that was never theirs, to divide. Back then, the prize was land, territory, resources, labor, and raw materials. Today it looks different: data, computing power, the systems were built out of both, but somehow the underlying deal feels almost the same. Once again, countries like Pakistan are on the receiving end of choices that are in reality made somewhere else, entirely.
But leapfrogging using someone else’s technology is a different thing from building your own. If every AI system running in Pakistan was trained elsewhere, using data which it never owned, on chips which it can not manufacture, under licenses it has no control over, that’s not really a ladder anymore. It starts to look more like a leash, just a longer one. And the moment those terms shift, through a new export policy rule or a sudden change in global politics, Pakistan finds out exactly how much independence it never actually had. One of these is an argument actually against Pakistan using AI. It’s an argument for emphasizing paying closer attention to how the country engages with it, not just whether it does. Most of the time, dependence doesn’t show up looking like control. It shows up looking like convenience, like the easiest and cheapest option sitting right there, until the day those terms quietly change without warning. The real question is whether Pakistan spends the next decade building genuine capacity of its own, in computers, in local talent, in data governance, or spends it finding out, too late, how little of its technological future was ever really its own.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Abdullah Abdul Rauf is an Intern at the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS), Islamabad, and a final-year Political Science student at the University of Gujrat. His research interests lie at the intersection of International Relations, artificial intelligence, digital sovereignty, technological dependence, and the geopolitical implications of emerging technologies.
