Egypt to draft national data centre strategy
Power, ICT and investment chiefs align Egypt data centre plans
#Egypt #datacentres - Egypt’s Minister of Electricity and Renewable Energy Mahmoud Esmat, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Raafat Hendy, and Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade Mohamed Farid have met to coordinate a national strategy for data centres and cloud computing, acting on directives from President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. The strategy will combine site selection, renewable energy supply, investment incentives and streamlined procedures to attract global cloud providers. The ministers agreed to build a national investment map of proposed data centre sites and form a joint working group to finalise the strategy. The move follows the recent licencing of a $400 million private sector data centre project by the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA).
SO WHAT? - Egypt is finally getting the investment it needs to build out data centre capacity to support its aspirations of becoming an international AI software and services hub. The NTRA has issued ten data centre licences over the past two years, the most recent being a licence granted to Hassan Allam Holding for a $400 million data centre project. So, although the government seems to be playing catch-up in developing a new national data centre strategy, to its credit it is aligning the government functions responsible for power supply, telecoms regulation and investment. Energy demands in particular will remain a persistent challenge as Egypt expands its sovereign compute capacity.
KEY POINTS:
Egypt’s electricity, ICT and investment ministers met at the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy headquarters in the New Capital to coordinate a national data centre and cloud computing strategy.
The strategy will cover potential data centre sites, renewable energy resources including solar and wind, investment incentives, infrastructure readiness and streamlined procedures for global investors.
Ministers agreed to build a national investment map detailing proposed sites, available utilities, power supply, regulatory requirements, indicative costs and contact points within responsible authorities.
The map will be reviewed by technical experts before publication on the website of Egypt’s General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI) and promoted abroad through commercial representative offices.
Minister of Electricity Mahmoud Esmat pointed to Egypt’s Integrated Sustainable Energy Strategy, which targets 45% renewable energy in the national mix within two years, as critical to supporting data centre power demand.
Minister Raafat Hendy highlighted Egypt’s submarine cable network and geographic position as competitive advantages for low-latency connectivity, framing data centres as a pillar of digital sovereignty rather than just an investment vehicle.
A joint working group will convene regularly to finalise the strategy, oversee related projects, and maintain a direct communication channel with global tech companies for site enquiries.
Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) has separately signed a licensing deal for a $400 million data centre with Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure and venture capital firm A15, the tenth such licence issued by the NTRA in two years.
The data centre push supports Egypt’s wider AI strategy, which targets $42.7 billion in AI-related economic value and a technology sector contributing 7.7% of GDP by 2030.
ZOOM OUT - Egypt’s National AI Strategy for 2025-2030 names infrastructure, including fair access to compute, storage and networking, as one of its four key enablers, but it stops short of laying out how the country gets there. National compute capacity and infrastructure readiness sit outside the AI strategy’s scope entirely. The document does flag the absence of a major hyperscaler presence, AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, as a real obstacle, since data locality rules mean Egyptian organisations can’t shift workloads abroad. Without local data centres, Egyptian entities miss out on the AI and machine learning services hyperscalers update continuously, forcing a choice between building those tools from scratch or paying for an expensive, slow on-prem deployment that quickly falls behind anyway.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: MCIT, MEAIN
Read more about other Egypt government news:
Egypt signs $400m data centre deal with Hassan Allam (Middle East AI News)
Egypt backs high-tech sector with export funds (Middle East AI News)
Egypt publishes AI governance & GenAI guidelines (Middle East AI News)
Egypt ranks first in Africa for government AI readiness (Middle East AI News)
Egypt, UNESCO launch 2025 AI readiness report (Middle East AI News)