When Nepal Khabar reported this week that Meta was investing approximately Rs 5 billion to build a data centre in Nepal through a partnership with WorldLink Communications, it sounded like a watershed moment for the country’s digital economy. WorldLink says it isn’t true.

The Nepali internet service provider, named as Meta’s local partner, denied the claim in an interview with Kantipur. “If a foreign investment of that size were coming in, we would have announced it through a formal event,” said Keshav Nepal, WorldLink’s Chief Executive. “There is no agreement, or NDA signed between Meta and us — none.”

The denial cuts to the heart of confusion spreading through Nepal’s tech conversation: the difference between a company choosing to invest directly in Nepal, and a company simply providing technical services to a Nepali firm that is itself building infrastructure.

WorldLink operates a Tier-3 data centre through its fully owned subsidiary Data World. Nepal remains optimistic about the sector’s longer-term future, as the country’s cool climate, clean hydropower and relatively low price per unit of energy make it attractive to data centre operators. But the country’s geography also creates real constraints. “We are somewhat distant from submarine cables,” he acknowledged. “But if Nepal can build strong infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted data connectivity, it can become a data centre hub.”

The same week, Bichuten Data Vault hosted a public event to announce a data centre development initiative in collaboration with Google Cloud, AMD, Micron Technology, and VVDN Technologies. Nepal Khabar headlined its coverage “Google enters Nepal as strategic partner with Bichuten” — a framing that the facts don’t support. Google Cloud is providing technical solutions and cloud services to the project. It is not investing capital. The infrastructure investment is entirely Bichuten’s own.

Bichuten is led by Nepali entrepreneurs Naveen Agrawal and Min Agrawal of Fair Group, along with Anuj Keyal of Keyal Group, Vishal Kumar Jatia, and Sharad Goel. The company says it is building a Tier-4 facility, which promises up to 99.995% uptime and less than 26 minutes of annual downtime — initially operating from two locations, Kathmandu and Birgunj, starting at 240 kilowatts of capacity and expanding to 5 megawatts by 2030. A facility at Chobhar is in its final stages and scheduled to begin operations in August 2026.

The arrangement is similar to Ncell’s use of Oracle’s private cloud solution: Oracle provided the technology, not the capital, and calling that an Oracle investment in Nepal would be misleading.

“What’s happening is that Nepali companies are partnering with international technology firms for services, and that’s being reported as foreign direct investment,” said Dipta Shah, a digital economy expert. “One can argue that the technology transfer component is present, but the capital commitment would appear to be domestic, not foreign.”

Shah is enthusiastic about Nepal’s digital infrastructure ambitions but urges caution in favour of leading with evidence versus hype. “Leading the discussion with established demand, a complete pre-feasibility study on both the benefits and costs relative to other locations, and the exact applications would be a prudent approach to establishing the long-term business case for hyperscalers in Nepal,” he said.

Shah cautioned that large data centres, particularly those used for AI workloads like training language models, consume enormous amounts of electricity, and Nepal needs to honestly assess whether its current and projected power surplus can support that ambition.

“The country’s hydropower potential is real, but potential and availability are not the same thing,” Shah said.