Inside Aziz Khan’s Vision to Turn Summit Group’s Power Plants Into Bangladesh’s AI Backbone

Muhammed Aziz Khan has spent roughly 40 years building power plants, a fiber network and an LNG terminal across Bangladesh. In comments Nikkei Asia reported in early January, the Summit Group chairman explained why those three businesses now add up to something new: a data centre.

A Conglomerate Built One Utility at a Time

Summit’s founder has long described his company’s mission in blunt, structural terms. “You have physical infrastructure and social infrastructure,” Khan has said of Bangladesh’s development gaps. “Our businesses are in physical infrastructure, ports, fiber optics and electricity generation.” That approach produced Summit Power International, now Bangladesh’s largest private power producer, whose first independent plant went into service in 1997. It produced Summit Communications, which built out a nationwide fiber network under a license granted by the country’s telecom regulator in 2009. It also built a floating LNG import terminal, the country’s second, which began pumping gas into the network in 2019.

Each business addressed a specific bottleneck: electricity shortages, a patchy internet backbone, and a gas supply that domestic production alone could not sustain. The LNG terminal alone, a floating storage and regasification unit with a daily send-out capacity of 500 million cubic feet, lifted the country’s total gas supply by roughly a quarter when it came online, according to figures Excelerate Energy, the terminal’s vessel operator, has published. Khan’s argument now is that the three businesses, taken together, solve a fourth bottleneck he did not anticipate when he built any of them: where to put a data centre in a country that struggles to supply reliable power and connectivity to greenfield developers.

The Pitch, In Khan’s Own Words

Khan has made the case in at least two interviews so far this year. Speaking with Nikkei Asia, he framed the plan as an extension of Summit’s existing footprint rather than a new business line. “Summit Group’s next phase [of growth] focuses on integrating energy and data, leveraging our LNG and fibre-optic expertise,” he said. Weeks later, in interviews with Platts, part of S&P Global Energy, he put the same idea more competitively. “Bangladesh and Summit are uniquely positioned with excess electricity capacity for the next few years,” Khan said. “We would like to be a pioneer in this global AI race.”

The excess capacity he is referring to comes from how Summit’s power contracts are structured. Its agreements with the Bangladeshi government typically pay for available capacity rather than electricity actually consumed, which means some of the company’s generation sits underused in ordinary operation. Yan-Bin Wu, Summit Power International’s deputy chief executive and chief financial officer, has described that spare capacity as exactly the kind of asset a data centre needs: continuous baseload power that intermittent renewable sources cannot supply without significant battery storage. Wu has called the resulting plan an integrated digital-energy ecosystem, built on assets the company already operates rather than new ones it would need to finance from scratch.

Three Inputs, Eighteen Months

Khan’s timeline claim is the boldest part of the pitch. Data centres commonly take several years from site selection to commissioning. Khan told Nikkei Asia his company could compress that to about a year and a half, and he has been consistent about why: Summit already controls electricity, fiber and land, the three things a greenfield developer would otherwise need to assemble one at a time. The planned facility would sit near Dhaka, beside gas plants Summit Power International already operates, on land the company holds through a subsidiary called Summit Technopolis Hi Tech Park.

Khan is not proposing to build alone. He has said Summit is looking for a partner with experience constructing and marketing data centres, and that some of the “Magnificent 7,” his shorthand for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, have expressed interest. He has not named a company or said what stage those conversations have reached, and he has set a modest near-term goal: signing one customer sometime this year.

A Skeptic’s View From

Not everyone reading Khan’s pitch reaches the same conclusion he does. Akihiro Shoji, an expert with the Japan International Cooperation Agency who works on Bangladesh’s technology sector, has offered a more cautious read of the same market. “For now, private investment is limited to small-scale data centres due to vulnerabilities in power and internet infrastructure,” Shoji told Nikkei Asia. “Political instability is also a country risk.” His view carries particular weight because JICA finances the kind of infrastructure lending that hyperscale projects eventually rely on, which makes its read on political risk relevant to how international lenders price a project at the scale Khan is describing.

Shoji’s caution does not amount to a dismissal. He also said Bangladesh’s “potential to function as a regional data centre hub is not low, as the domestic market is expected to grow steadily,” pointing to the same government investment in broadband and digital infrastructure that has drawn Summit toward the sector in the first place. Khan and Shoji are describing different things: Khan the assets Summit has built, Shoji the financing that has actually cleared underwriting so far. Both can be accurate at once, and the gap between them is a reasonable measure of how far Summit’s plan still has to travel before it becomes a signed contract rather than an interview.

The Regulation Working in Summit’s Favor

Khan has pointed to one piece of law as a demand driver Summit did not have to create itself: banks, hospitals and government agencies that must keep certain categories of data onshore need somewhere onshore to keep it. What began in November 2025 as a Personal Data Protection Ordinance restricting the export of national ID numbers, biometric records and other sensitive categories has since been passed by Parliament as a permanent statute, the Personal Data Protection Act, 2026 (Act No. 63 of 2026), according to a Securiti summary of the law. The residency requirement it carries forward is already in force; a separate set of enforcement mechanisms, including a chief data officer appointment, is not due until May 2027. Whatever demand the law creates, it will need somewhere to land, and Khan is betting that somewhere is Summit’s.

Bangladesh’s data centre market is still small in absolute terms, an estimated 23.55 megawatts of installed IT load in 2025, but it is growing at a compound annual rate approaching 45 percent, according to Mordor Intelligence, with hyperscale cloud tenants already claiming 62 percent of commissioned capacity in 2024. A handful of domestic operators, including Felicity IDC and Red Digital, currently serve that demand, alongside a government-run facility in Dhaka certified to the industry’s highest reliability tier, according to Data Center Dynamics. None of them owns power generation the way Summit does, which is precisely the gap Khan is trying to fill before a better-capitalized rival notices it.

Reconsidering a Deadline He Once Believed In

The data centre plan sits awkwardly next to Khan’s own account of Bangladesh’s climate math. The energy think tank Ember puts renewables at just 2 percent of Bangladesh’s electricity mix in 2024. The government wants that figure at 25 percent by 2035. A gas-fired data centre does not close that gap.

Khan has been candid about how his own thinking has shifted. “Until about two years back, we were trying to target ourselves to be along with the whole world, [thinking] that by 2050 we should be disposing of all our hydrocarbon-based generation,” he told Nikkei Asia. “Now, Bangladesh’s circumstances as well as global circumstances have changed, so we have to recast that model” to include technologies such as carbon capture. It is a rare admission from a chairman: the country he built his business around, in his own telling, can no longer afford to keep a hydrocarbon phase-out on its original schedule, whatever the goal’s merits.

Waiting on a Government Not Yet in Place

Khan gave his most detailed comments to Nikkei Asia while Bangladesh was still governed on an interim basis, ahead of the parliamentary election held Feb. 12, 2026, the country’s first national vote since Sheikh Hasina’s ouster in 2024. He described the vote, still weeks away, as the precondition for everything else Summit wanted to do. “For investment, the essential foundations are rule of law, democracy and policy predictability,” he said. “A prime minister elected by the people would hopefully be able to give at least five years of certainty in their policymaking.”

The election has since happened, and it delivered a decisive answer. Voters handed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party 209 of the 300-member Parliament’s 297 contested seats, well past the two-thirds threshold, according to broadcast reporting on the results, and the newly elected legislature was sworn in on Feb. 16. Whether that outcome delivers the certainty Khan said Summit was waiting for is a question the data centre plan cannot answer on its own. What Khan has built, over four decades, is a company positioned to move fast the moment it does, and a chairman still willing to say, in public interviews, that his own assumptions about Bangladesh’s energy future needed revising along the way.

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