Sindh proposes Huawei smart city platform for Karachi, with a flood early-warning pilot to start in one district, as chief minister tours Wuhan AI computing centre
KARACHI: Karachi’s oldest problems — streets that flood in an hour of rain, traffic that locks for no obvious reason, water and waste services that react late — are being pitched a data-driven answer. On a visit to Huawei’s global model site for digital urban governance in Wuhan, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah proposed a partnership to build a smart city operations platform for the metropolis of more than 20 million people. It would start small: a pilot in a single district, centred on flood early warning and day-to-day city operations, before any wider rollout.
The idea is a control-room view of the city. Real-time data and monitoring tools, of the kind the Wuhan city operation centre uses for traffic, emergencies and public services, would feed flood forecasting, coordinate emergency response and track the departments responsible for water and solid waste. Shah was careful to say Sindh does not want a shopping list of equipment. The province is asking for a long-term arrangement built around technology transfer, training and local expertise, with study visits for Sindh officials to Wuhan and collaboration between Huawei and the province’s universities and technical institutions. An MoU with Huawei is planned at the Sindh Investment and Trade Conference in Shanghai later this week, officials said.
The delegation also toured the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Centre, operating since 2021 and expanded to 400 petaflops of shared computing capacity that universities, researchers and start-ups can draw on without building their own facilities. Shah sought similar access to AI training and computing resources for Sindh’s universities and researchers, and spoke of developing Karachi Education City as a hub for higher education and emerging technology.
The Wuhan leg carried more than technology. The chief minister discussed Karachi’s proposed 100-kilometre K-IV pipeline with HBSZ, which expressed willingness to build it, and inspected gates being fabricated for Sukkur Barrage: 44 of its 54 river gates have been replaced, the remaining 10 are ready for shipment, and 110 canal gates are in fabrication under a project due for completion by June 2027. Humanwell Healthcare was invited to set up pharmaceutical manufacturing in Sindh, and a Wuhan seed company was offered joint research on climate-resilient crops. For Karachi residents, though, the test is narrower and closer to home: whether a warning system in one pilot district is working before the next heavy rain, not after it.
