The global battle for artificial intelligence dominance is moving deeper into Africa, with Egypt emerging as a new front in the technology rivalry between the United States and China.
Chinese technology giant Huawei has submitted a proposal to build AI data centres for the Egyptian government, a deal that would deploy more than 2,000 of its advanced Ascend processors and give the company a significant foothold in one of Africa’s largest economies.
Washington is now moving to counter the offer, with the US State Department approaching Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Microsoft to assemble an American consortium to challenge Huawei for the project.
The emerging contest goes beyond a single data centre contract, placing Egypt at the centre of a wider struggle over who will supply the chips, cloud infrastructure and software powering the next generation of AI systems in Africa and other emerging markets.
Huawei puts more than 2,000 AI chips on the table
