Cambodia is seeking an adviser for a planned national artificial intelligence centre that the government describes as “sovereign” and says will be financed by France’s development agency.
The word is already at work in Phnom Penh. In December 2025 local operator ByteDC announced the launch of what it billed as Cambodia’s first high-performance “sovereign cloud”, powered by Huawei Cloud Stack. In 2021 the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (MPTC) — which is running the new tender — issued Huawei a consulting and technical service certification licence, making it the country’s first authorised cloud provider.
The ministry’s request for expressions of interest, published in August, seeks an owner’s technical adviser to design the National AI and Data Science Research Centre and run its procurement. An accessible version of the tender document sets an 18 September deadline, while the current MPTC notice gives 12 September.
The mandatory qualifications lean towards construction: experience with buildings of about 3,000 square metres and Tier III data centres of about 1,000 square metres — benchmarks for the adviser’s past work, not the proposed centre’s disclosed size — while AI and high-performance computing experience counts only as an “advantage”.
Grenoble Alpes University signed a tripartite agreement with the ministry and the Cambodia Academy of Digital Technology (CADT) in July; CADT says the partnership will train 50 master’s and PhD scholars over four years.
CADT has described the project as part of a €20mn funding initiative backed by MPTC and AFD, but has not disclosed AFD’s share, the financing instrument or its terms. The centre’s capacity, site, cost and hardware are also undisclosed. AFD says its financing is untied by supplier nationality, subject to eligibility and exclusion rules; the technical and security requirements for any later equipment tender are not yet public.
If a later equipment tender is issued, it will show what Cambodia’s “sovereign” AI actually runs on — and who supplies it.
