Egyptian president launches 2025-2030 National AI Strategy
AI strategy to grow ICT contribution to 7.7% of GDP by 2030
#Egypt #AIStrategy – Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi launched the country’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025–2030 this week, reaffirming the nation’s commitment to leveraging AI technologies to drive progress, foster innovation, and improve living standards. The strategy aims to position Egypt as a leading AI hub in the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region. With plans to boost the ICT sector’s contribution to GDP to 7.7% by 2030, the strategy focuses on six pillars: governance, infrastructure, technology, data, ecosystem, and talent. This ambitious roadmap also targets the establishment of 250+ AI companies and a workforce of 30,000 AI professionals by 2030.
SO WHAT? – The new 2025-2030 National AI Strategy builds on and replaces the first strategy that was launched by President El-Sisi in 2021. This marks the beginning of the second phase of the original strategy plan, which included work implemented during 2020. Phase two of the strategy was originally planned to begin in 2022, but plans changed with the arrival of ChatGPT and the new wave of Generative AI, so the phase now begins in 2025. Core to the 2025-2030 strategy are inclusive AI to support the Digital Egypt strategy (which aims to bring benefits to all Egyptians) and the development of a national foundational model as a basis to develop and implement GenAI solutions for public and private sectors. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have all delivered national foundation models, and a new Egyptian model could prove to be a key inflection point for Egypt’s AI adoption.
Here are some key points about the 2025-2030 Egypt National AI Strategy:
The Egypt National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025–2030 was announced by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Wednesday.
The 80-page national strategy seeks to raise the ICT sector’s contribution to Egypt’s GDP to 7.7% by 2030, include the creation of 250+ AI startups and develop a talent pool of 30,000 AI professionals.
The new strategy focuses on six pillars: Governance, ICT and AI infrastructure, Technology, Data, Ecosystem, and Talent.
Key to the vision of the 2025-2039 strategy is 1) driving inclusive AI to foster Digital Egypt, which seeks to social and economic development and benefiting all Egyptians; and 2) the development of a national foundational model “as a basis to
drive industry development and regional cooperation.”
Egypt aims to develop a large national Arabic language model to perform tasks such as language translation, sentiment analysis, and content generation with a high level of accuracy and efficiency, specifically in Arabic language.
The national LLM would then be used to enable domain-specific LLMs for key industries - such as agriculture, healthcare and law - support new digital industries and generally improve efficiency.
The strategy emphasises ethical AI use, with a comprehensive regulatory framework under the Egyptian Charter for Responsible AI (published in 2023).
Plans include supporting AI startups and R&D through dedicated grants, funding, and international collaboration.
Also strengthening infrastructure with cutting-edge data centres, widespread 5G connectivity, and sustainable computing facilities.
ZOOM OUT – Egypt has been working on national artificial intelligence plans since 2017. Key milestones in the national AI journey include the establishment of the National Council for Artificial Intelligence in 2019, the launch of the first comprehensive Egypt National AI Strategy by the President in 2021, and the formation of the Applied Innovation Center. The first national strategy planned to harness AI for economic and social development via four main pillars: AI for Government, AI for Development, AI for Human Capacity Building, and AI for External Relations. Egypt rose 49 places on the Government AI Readiness Index issued by Oxford Insights, from rank 111 in 2019 to 62 in 2023.
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