CAIRO, Sept. 3 — Huawei has bid to build AI data centres for the Egyptian government, and the US State Department has approached Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft about a possible counteroffer, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 26. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Cairo on Sept. 1–2 produced a joint communiqué on AI and data-centre cooperation that named no project.
Huawei proposed supplying 1,408 of its Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud, plus 600 more — either the same chip family or the earlier 910B — for two inference clusters, over a 12-month build, according to Bloomberg, which reviewed the tender documents. Bloomberg said the process may be the first time the United States and China have competed directly for the same government AI data-centre tender.
No US consortium or rival bid has been publicly confirmed. Microsoft declined to comment and Nvidia and AMD did not respond, Bloomberg reported, and no timetable has been announced for Egypt to choose a supplier.
Washington’s leverage runs through export licensing rather than a rival bid: a Commerce Department rule in October 2023 extended licence requirements for advanced computing chips to more than 40 additional countries judged to pose diversion risks, Egypt among them.
The joint communiqué issued on Sept. 2 did not address the procurement. China and Egypt said they would encourage companies to cooperate on artificial intelligence and deepen work in cloud computing, data centres, the data economy, semiconductors and cybersecurity, and called for stronger exchanges of technology and expertise to support Egypt’s digital transformation. China’s Foreign Ministry said the two leaders witnessed the signing of cooperation documents covering artificial intelligence and other fields. The statement identified no project, investment amount, site, capacity, hardware supplier or construction timetable.
Egypt has been assembling the administrative groundwork for a wider pipeline. Three ministries said in June that they were preparing a national data-centre strategy and investment map covering sites, energy, telecommunications infrastructure and incentives. The telecoms regulator licensed Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure in June to build and operate data centres; the company said it planned to invest about $400 million in a first phase but disclosed no site, capacity or construction date. State grid operator EETC signed a memorandum on June 25 with a company rendered as Heca Data to study expected loads, grid connection and implementation phases for a new facility.
Huawei says its Cairo cloud region went live in 2024 as part of a five-year, $300 million plan. It also announced an AI-cloud partnership with Egyptian developer Talaat Moustafa Group in 2024 covering cloud data centres and planned NOOR Cloud services for Noor City; neither announcement established that the facilities were commissioned or serving customers.
SouthwardTech reported on Sept. 1 that an unnamed alliance of US data-centre developers had joined Heka Data in talks with Electricity Minister Mahmoud Esmat over power supply for what the ministry called a global data-centre project. The alliance’s members, and the project’s site, capacity and timetable, were not disclosed.
No public source reviewed for this report connects the Heka project to the Huawei tender or shows that a US counteroffer has been submitted. The outcome still depends on Egypt’s supplier decision, whether a US offer materialises, and who provides the power and financing for any project.
