Egypt plans to allocate as much as $860mn a year to data centres, cloud computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure through 2030, as the government seeks to build the computing capacity needed for its expanding digital economy.
Annual investment is expected to range between $500mn and $860mn, starting in the current 2026/27 fiscal year, according to an official Ministry of Communications and Information Technology document reviewed by Asharq Bloomberg. The plan targets investment equivalent to 0.10%-0.15% of GDP in data centres, computing infrastructure and AI applications.
The programme marks an attempt to turn Egypt’s long standing role as a transit route for international data into a larger domestic computing industry, capturing more value from cloud services, data storage and AI workloads.
Funding would be directed towards new data centres and computing infrastructure, stronger data security and privacy, and wider use of AI across selected state-owned companies.
The initiative forms part of a broader national strategy for data centres and cloud computing being developed by the communications, electricity and investment ministries. The government is assessing potential locations, power and renewable-energy requirements, telecommunications infrastructure and investment incentives as it seeks to attract private and foreign capital into the sector.
Alongside the expansion in computing capacity, Egypt is stepping up investment in the networks connecting businesses and consumers to digital services.
The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) is targeting about EGP2.5bn in telecommunications infrastructure investment this year, up from EGP2bn in 2025, according to Asharq Bloomberg. The spending is expected to focus on improving mobile coverage in remote areas, along desert roads and in villages covered by the government’s Haya Karima rural-development programme.
NTRA has previously used its Universal Service Fund to extend connectivity into commercially underserved areas. Under the first phase of Haya Karima, 1,096 mobile stations were deployed across 899 villages, including 594 financed through the fund.
Regulators are also tightening controls over the subscriber data underpinning Egypt’s mobile economy. The country’s four mobile operators have given corporate users up to 30 days to regularise older SIM registrations and sign contracts identifying the lines’ actual users, according to industry sources cited by Al Borsa.
The action follows a wider regulatory crackdown on mobile-line registration. NTRA this month referred all four operators to the Public Prosecution after investigating complaints that lines had been registered using citizens’ personal information without their knowledge or possession.
The regulator also suspended bulk sales and activation of new lines through corporate systems and ordered existing users to regularise their contracts. It is accelerating the introduction of biometric identity verification as part of tighter controls designed to protect personal data and establish the identity of actual SIM users.
Together, the measures point to a widening digital-infrastructure agenda encompassing compute capacity, connectivity and data governance.
Egypt’s extensive international cable connections give it a natural advantage in moving data between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The harder task is capturing more of the economic value generated by that traffic.
Success will depend on power availability, access to renewable energy, cybersecurity, regulatory certainty and whether public investment can attract major private cloud and data-centre operators. If it can, Egypt’s role could begin shifting from a corridor for international data to a market that stores, processes and extracts more value from it locally.
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