Google Just Opened an Office in Pakistan
On August 18, 2026, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood in Islamabad and inaugurated Google's first physical office in Pakistan. A nine-member Google delegation, led by Vice President Wilson White, was in the room. Cameras were rolling. The headlines wrote themselves: a $30 billion IT export dream, a decade of Google's "investment," a "digital era" beginning. Thirteen months earlier, Microsoft quietly shut its Pakistan operations after 25 years in the country. Careem suspended its ride-hailing service. P&G, Shell, Yamaha, and Pfizer had all been scaling back or exiting. Startup funding had collapsed by 88 percent in two years. So which story is true? Is Pakistan a country foreign tech companies are abandoning, or one they're finally taking seriously? The honest answer is both, and understanding why both are happening at the same time tells you more about where Pakistan's tech industry is actually headed than either headline alone. Why are the...