I believe Nepal must invest in a Sovereign AI Infrastructure: a national AI compute center (“AI Factory”) powered by Nepal’s hydropower, built for government, universities, and thousands of Nepali AI entrepreneurs, startups, researchers, and students.
This is not just about technology sovereignty. It is also an economic strategy. Nepal can effectively export electricity packaged as compute power to the world. Instead of only selling raw electricity, Nepal can transform clean energy into high value AI infrastructure and digital exports, creating jobs, attracting investment, increasing foreign revenue, and positioning Nepal as a regional AI hub.
Imagine 10,000+ AI entrepreneurs and researchers getting access to this compute capacity. This could unlock a new generation of research breakthroughs, Nepal focused AI applications, and AI startups building advanced products for both Nepal and global markets. It would create high value jobs, help retain talented engineers and researchers in Nepal, strengthen universities and innovation ecosystems.
Countries around the world are racing to secure sovereign AI capabilities. Nepal has a unique advantage: access to low cost clean energy through hydropower. If Nepal acts now, the country can convert this energy advantage into AI infrastructure, digital exports, and long term economic growth!
Why Nepal must build a sovereign ‘AI Factory’
Sovereign AI infrastructure could transform Nepal from a consumer of technology into a producer of digital intelligence.
by Sameer Maskey
While Nepal celebrates the progress it has made in exporting electricity to India, a quieter but a very consequential global race is underway: the race to export digital intelligence produced in AI factories. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly emerging as the defining technological platform of the 21st century. From education and healthcare to agriculture, finance, governance, and defence, AI systems will increasingly shape how nations operate, innovate, and compete. Yet behind every major AI breakthrough lies one critical resource: compute infrastructure.
Compute, the large scale processing power required to train and run AI models, is becoming as strategically important as electricity, highways, or internet infrastructure. Nations around the world are investing billions of dollars into advanced AI compute centers because they understand a simple reality: Whoever controls compute will help shape the future digital economy. These next generation facilities, sometimes referred to as ‘AI Factories’, are fundamentally different from traditional data centers that mainly store databases, applications, and enterprise software.
Modern AI compute centers (AI Factories) are designed to produce intelligence at scale by transforming electricity, data, and GPUs into AI models, AI services, and digital intelligence. In many ways, they are becoming the industrial engines of the emerging AI economy.
Nepal must recognise this moment and act decisively. The country needs to build a national AI compute center (AI Factory) as foundational infrastructure for the next phase of economic growth. Such infrastructure would not only support domestic AI research and entrepreneurship but also establish Nepal’s technological sovereignty in an increasingly AI driven world.
Today, most AI systems used in Nepal rely heavily on foreign infrastructure, models, and cloud providers. While this has accelerated access to AI technologies, it also creates important challenges around data access, security, privacy, reliability, and national control. As Nepal’s institutions increasingly adopt AI systems, building a sovereign AI stack, including domestic compute infrastructure, local AI models, secure data environments, and national guardrails, is no longer optional. It is the only way to maintain control over sensitive data, strengthen long term technological resilience, and adapt AI governance to Nepal’s own national priorities.
But sovereign AI is not only about security. It is also about economic opportunity. A national AI compute center would create the foundational platform upon which Nepali entrepreneurs, startups, researchers, and institutions could innovate. Today, one of the biggest barriers facing AI startups globally is the high cost of compute resources. Access to GPUs and AI cloud infrastructure remains expensive and concentrated in a handful of countries and corporations. A domestic compute infrastructure could dramatically lower barriers for Nepali innovators, enabling students, startups, universities, and companies to build AI products locally rather than depending entirely on foreign cloud providers.
This is where Nepal holds a unique strategic advantage.
Electricity is the single largest operating cost for AI compute/data centers, and Nepal possesses abundant hydropower resources capable of producing low cost renewable electricity.
While electricity prices in the United States typically range from 10 to 30 cents per kilowatt hour, and European rates run even higher at 15 to 40 cents per kilowatt hour, Nepal's hydropower can support compute infrastructure at just 5 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour, among the lowest rates globally.
This provides highly competitive unit economics against compute center operators running in markets around the world where electricity costs are multiples higher, creating a powerful economic arbitrage opportunity for AI infrastructure built on Nepal's clean, abundant hydropower.As AI compute becomes a globally traded digital commodity, countries with abundant low-cost energy are emerging as highly attractive destinations for next-generation AI infrastructure. Nepal is uniquely positioned to become a regional and global provider of affordable, clean AI compute powered by renewable hydropower. A 10-megawatt AI compute facility housing approximately 2,000 to 4,000 GPUs would require a total investment of roughly $110 million to $200 million, including construction, cooling systems, power infrastructure, and high-speed networking. Nepal’s low labor costs, high-altitude cooling advantages, and direct access to hydropower can significantly reduce the non-GPU portion of these costs compared to Western markets, where equivalent facilities would require substantially higher capital expenditure. Such a facility could generate between $35 million and $80 million annually in compute revenue. At 100 megawatts with 20,000 to 40,000 GPUs, annual compute revenue could reach several hundred million dollars depending on utilization rates, GPU pricing, and market demand. Such an AI factory would support government digitisation, universities, startups, and research institutions while also making compute capacity available to global markets, enabling Nepal to capture significantly more value from its hydropower than electricity export alone. Careful planning will also be necessary to minimise ecological impacts associated with expanding hydropower and large scale energy intensive infrastructure.
By processing data locally, Nepal can export digital intelligence as a global commodity through the internet, bypassing the physical limitations of traditional electricity transmission grids.
For Nepal, this represents more than a technology project. It represents
a national development strategy.
Just as previous generations invested in roads, airports, electricity grids and telecommunications networks, this generation must invest in AI infrastructure. Governments do not build roads because roads themselves generate immediate profit. They build roads because roads enable economic ecosystems to emerge. AI compute infrastructure must now be viewed through the same lens, and with greater urgency.
Importantly, while private industry will increasingly invest in building AI compute centers and AI factories, Nepal still needs an initial large scale government backed investment to establish a foundational national compute capability. The scale, long term horizon, and infrastructure risk of building the country’s first major AI factory may be difficult for the private sector alone to undertake in the early stages. A government initiated national AI compute center would catalyse the entire ecosystem by creating foundational infrastructure, attracting talent, enabling startups and research institutions, and establishing Nepal as a serious destination for AI infrastructure. Once such a foundation is established, it can trigger a multiplier effect that attracts significantly more private capital, global partnerships, and further investments into additional compute centers and AI Factories across the country.
This goes unfathomably beyond an IT project and equips Nepal with the economic infrastructure for the AI century. The countries that move early will gain disproportionate advantages in innovation, talent attraction, entrepreneurship, and digital competitiveness. Nepal has a rare opportunity to combine its hydropower advantage with the global rise of AI to create an entirely new economic sector. The future looks clear: AI infrastructure will be essential for all. The question is whether Nepal will start building its own AI future. The future digital and AI economy will run on compute. Without a sovereign AI compute infrastructure, Nepal will merely be consumers of AI. With it, Nepal becomes active creators and exporters of intelligence.
Nepal Does Not Need a Government AI Factory. It Needs a Silicon Valley Moonshot.
A recent opinion piece in the The Kathmandu Post makes an important argument: artificial intelligence infrastructure matters. On that, there is no disagreement. AI is becoming the new electricity. Compute is becoming the new oil. Nations that control abundant, cheap, scalable compute will shape the global economy of the next 50 years.
And Nepal has a once-in-a-century opportunity.
But the article makes a crucial strategic mistake when it argues that Nepal needs a government-backed sovereign AI factory to lead the way.
No. Absolutely not.
This cannot become a Nepal government project.
And it should not become a US government project either.
This needs to be a Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial project driven by founders, engineers, global capital, and world-scale ambition.
That project already exists: Himalayan Compute.
Governments Don’t Build Trillion-Dollar Technology Platforms
Governments build roads, regulations, and public utilities. They do not build globally dominant technology companies.
The internet was commercialized by startups.
Cloud computing was scaled by startups.
AI is being accelerated by startups.
The most transformative compute companies in the world were not created by ministries:
NVIDIA
Amazon
OpenAI
Google
Oracle
They were built by entrepreneurs operating with extreme speed, talent concentration, and risk appetite.
A Nepal government-run AI factory would likely become:
slow,
bureaucratic,
politically captured,
procurement-heavy,
innovation-light,
and permanently dependent on public financing.
That is the opposite of what Nepal needs.
Nepal’s Role Is To Enable, Not Control
Nepal’s comparative advantage is not state management.
Nepal’s comparative advantage is geography.
Hydropower.
Cool climate.
Altitude.
Proximity to India and China.
Abundant renewable energy potential.
And the possibility of offering the cheapest clean compute on Earth.
That is the opportunity.
Nepal should focus on:
fast approvals,
energy access,
land coordination,
fiber connectivity,
legal clarity,
tax predictability,
and a one-desk policy directly under the Nepal Prime Minister’s Office.
That’s it.
The government should act like Singapore or Dubai at their best:
facilitator, not operator.
Himalayan Compute Understands Scale
The sovereign AI factory argument thinks too small.
The mentality is:
“Let us build one national compute center.”
That is a bureaucratic mindset.
Himalayan Compute thinks in planetary terms.
Its vision is not one compute center.
Its vision is a global compute ecosystem stretching across Nepal’s hydropower corridors and eventually serving the world’s AI demand.
The roadmap is ambitious but staged intelligently:
First $1M.
Then $10M.
Then $100M.
Then $1B.
Then $10B.
Eventually over $100B from global institutional capital, especially Sovereign Wealth Funds in the Gulf.
That is how real infrastructure revolutions happen.
Not through parliamentary committee meetings.
But through relentless execution and compounding credibility.
The Gulf Money Is Real
The future of AI infrastructure will require trillions in capital globally.
Where will that money come from?
Not from Nepal’s annual budget.
The answer is obvious:
Gulf sovereign wealth funds.
The Gulf states are actively diversifying away from oil and aggressively investing in:
AI,
cloud infrastructure,
energy transition,
data centers,
and strategic compute assets.
Nepal offers something uniquely attractive:
abundant green energy combined with dramatically lower operating costs.
A visionary global project can attract Gulf capital.
A Nepal government department cannot.
Global investors do not deploy tens of billions because a ministry wrote a white paper. They invest because founders present a scalable business model with global demand.
This Is A Silicon Valley Story
The psychological model should not be:
“state-owned utility.”
The model should be:
“Silicon Valley moonshot.”
That means:
founders,
venture capital,
hyperscale ambition,
global recruiting,
strategic partnerships,
and exponential growth thinking.
The world’s next trillion-dollar infrastructure companies will be AI infrastructure companies.
Nepal has a chance to host one.
But only if it thinks like Silicon Valley, not like a licensing office.
Sameer Maskey Should Write The First Check
One name stands out immediately: Sameer Maskey.
His company, Fusemachines, achieved something historic: a Nepali-founded tech company reaching the public markets through Nasdaq.
That matters.
Nepal does not yet have many globally proven technology founders.
Sameer Maskey is one of them.
And this moment calls for leadership.
Fusemachines should invest $1 million into Himalayan Compute.
Not as charity.
Not as patriotism alone.
But as one of the greatest asymmetric investment opportunities imaginable.
This is the modern equivalent of Yahoo investing early in Alibaba.
At the time, many people thought Yahoo was merely placing a speculative bet.
Instead, that investment became one of the most legendary venture outcomes in technology history.
A $1 million investment today could become $1 billion within a decade if Himalayan Compute executes successfully.
That is not fantasy.
That is how venture-scale infrastructure wealth is created.
Nepal Must Think Bigger Than Aid
For too long, Nepal has thought in terms of:
aid,
remittances,
tourism,
and incremental development.
AI changes the equation.
Compute changes the equation.
For the first time in modern history, Nepal can become strategically central to a foundational global industry.
But this requires abandoning small thinking.
The goal is not:
“a respectable national AI center.”
The goal is:
build one of the world’s largest clean compute ecosystems.
That requires entrepreneurs.
Capital markets.
Global partnerships.
And founders willing to think at trillion-dollar scale.
The Government’s Job Is Simple
The Nepal government should not attempt to become an AI operator.
Its role is much more important:
remove friction.
Approve fast.
Coordinate power.
Enable land access.
Protect investors.
Ensure regulatory clarity.
Create one-desk execution.
And get out of the way.
If Nepal does that successfully, Himalayan Compute and projects like it can attract the world.
And if that happens, Nepal could become not merely a participant in the AI revolution—but one of its physical foundations.
Nepal's Trillion Dollar Himalayan Compute Plan 🏔️Himalayan Compute: Nepal’s Blueprint for Triple-Digit Economic Growth
Sameer Maskey: Why Nepal must build a sovereign ‘AI Factory’ https://t.co/lgeg57l5UR @sameermaskey Should Write The First Check@fusemachines should invest $1 million into Himalayan Compute.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 26, 2026
A $1 million investment today could become $1 billion within a decade.
Maskey is the Founder and CEO at Fusemachines Inc and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University.
Sameer Maskey: Why Nepal must build a sovereign ‘AI Factory’ https://t.co/lgeg57l5UR@fusemachines should invest $1 million into Himalayan Compute. A $1 million investment today could become $1 billion within a decade.@sameermaskey @SwarnimWagle @shisir @ShahBalen @hamrorabi
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 26, 2026
Nepal's Race To Build Global AI Infrastructure https://t.co/rjFdx912yE @sameermaskey @SwarnimWagle @shisir @ShahBalen @hamrorabi @fusemachines @PM_nepal_ @manishjhanepal @Amiteshshah1 @ersnshah @pchamal @ashika71 @mkoirala @sasmitp @ToshimaKarkiDr @MoewriNp
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 26, 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment