China’s Huawei has submitted a bid to build data center infrastructure for Egyptian authorities, signaling it is ready to bring its artificial intelligence accelerator to the global market. This reportedly caused panic in Washington, who urgently began preparing counter-proposals Bloomberg.
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Huawei proposed to provide Egypt with 1,408 Ascend 950 flagship accelerators for cloud-based artificial intelligence training environment, and 600 Ascend 910B accelerators for inference, that is, starting already trained models. The company has proposed a 12-month infrastructure development plan. If it wins, Huawei will become a major supplier of artificial intelligence infrastructure in Africa’s second-largest economy and gain an important springboard for further expansion in the region. Additionally, this will be the first known export contract to supply Huawei’s Ascend accelerator.
The United States is already actively investing in AI infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and now Egypt is also attracting Washington’s attention. When U.S. President Trump’s administration learned of Huawei’s proposal, the U.S. State Department approached Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft to propose forming a U.S. consortium and prepare a bid.
The White House has previously warned other countries that using some of Huawei’s accelerators without Washington’s permission could have legal consequences. Now Egypt finds itself at the center of a technological confrontation between the United States and China. The tender may be the first time the two countries directly compete for a government project to create large-scale artificial intelligence infrastructure. The result will test both Huawei’s export capabilities and the Trump administration’s “semiconductor diplomacy.”
Huawei is already actively working with African government customers to provide solutions in education, healthcare and other areas, including Egypt and Kenya. Huawei’s application to the Egyptian government also involved the participation of iFlytek, which was included on the U.S. blacklist along with Huawei. Chinese companies are supplying Egypt with vehicle and citizen identification systems, as well as “situational awareness” complexes that allow them to “see a panoramic view of the city on one screen.”
So far, U.S. AI infrastructure companies have not shown much interest in Egypt, and it is not a priority for the Trump administration. China is now suddenly at the center of Washington’s attention, a sign of how seriously it takes Huawei’s attempts to bring its artificial intelligence accelerator to global markets.
The accelerator proposed to Egypt in 2008 represented a relatively small system by modern AI infrastructure standards. Their computing power can replace hundreds of advanced NVIDIA accelerators in typical model training scenarios, and the largest AI companies in the West use clusters on tens or hundreds of thousands of chips. For Huawei, however, the precedent itself is more important: the contract will confirm the existence of foreign demand for Ascend and the ability to supply these accelerators in the required quantities.
Last year, Huawei tried to sell thousands of Ascend 910C accelerators to the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asian countries, but there was no information about the signing of relevant contracts. One of the obstacles at the time remained limited wafer production. Now Huawei has supplied Egypt with its latest Ascend 950DT. The company has also promoted the model in South Korea and is considering the possibility of supplying it to Latin American countries.
Huawei’s desire to attract foreign customers does not mean that the company has fully satisfied the needs of the domestic market. Even Chinese AI developers like DeepSeek and Moonshot continue to use Nvidia hardware. Still, Huawei is clearly ready to compete with the American company not just in China, but also abroad. Initial small-scale deliveries could help it gain a foothold in foreign markets, just as Huawei once began its international expansion in telecom equipment.
Last year, Malaysia announced the creation of a national artificial intelligence system based on Huawei chips that was comparable in size to Egypt’s proposed project, but later distanced itself from the initiative under U.S. pressure. In Malaysia, where the data center industry is currently actively developing, Egypt’s ecosystem is decidedly more modest. However, Egypt’s national strategy states that by 2030, the contribution of artificial intelligence to the country’s economy will reach 7.7% of GDP.
Egypt does not produce its own artificial intelligence accelerators, and U.S. restrictions make it difficult to obtain advanced chips from the United States. Egypt still faces export curbs after the Trump administration decided not to tighten restrictions put in place under Joe Biden over concerns about losing emerging markets to Huawei.
Now, the White House is offering these countries another option: a plan to promote exports of comprehensive U.S. artificial intelligence solutions, with the potential for government funding. The goal is to prevent countries in the Global South from opting for cheaper Chinese infrastructure. It remains unclear what specific conditions the United States is prepared to offer Egypt to counterbalance Huawei.
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