Egypt's National AI Strategy 2.0: A Blueprint for 2030

✨ The Second Phase of Digital Transformation

The National Council for Artificial Intelligence has officially unveiled the second edition of the National AI Strategy (2025-2030). Unlike the initial phase, which focused on laying foundational infrastructure and building awareness, this new roadmap is about scale, impact, and measurable economic outcomes. Egypt's first AI strategy, launched in 2019, was largely about positioning the country on the global AI map. It succeeded in establishing key institutions, attracting international attention, and creating early pilot programs. But the second edition is fundamentally different—it comes with hard targets, dedicated funding, and a clear implementation timeline that holds government ministries accountable.

🔹 The Six Strategic Pillars in Detail

The strategy is built on a robust framework designed to integrate AI into every facet of the Egyptian economy. Each pillar has specific KPIs and designated responsible agencies:

• ✅ Governance: Establishing a regulatory sandbox for ethical AI testing, ensuring safe deployment of Generative AI models. This includes creating a national AI ethics board, drafting comprehensive legislation for algorithmic accountability, and mandating bias audits for any AI system used in public services. The sandbox program targets onboarding 50 companies in its first year.
• ✅ Ecosystem: Supporting the launch of 250+ new AI-driven startups through the Creativa Innovation Hubs. The government is allocating EGP 500 million in matching grants for early-stage AI companies, with a focus on Arabic NLP, healthcare diagnostics, and precision agriculture. Incubation periods last 18 months and include free cloud computing credits through partnerships with AWS and Google Cloud.
• ✅ Infrastructure: Expanding data center capacity in the Suez Canal Economic Zone to support localized LLM training. The plan includes building three Tier IV data centers, each with a power capacity of 20MW, designed to handle the computational demands of training large language models on Arabic-first datasets. Egypt's strategic location makes it ideal for serving both African and Middle Eastern markets with low-latency AI services.
• ✅ Data: Democratizing access to non-sensitive government datasets for researchers via the new Egypt Open Data Portal. Over 2,000 datasets across health, transportation, agriculture, and education are slated for release by mid-2027. The portal will implement API-first access with standardized formats, making it dramatically easier for startups and researchers to build data-driven solutions.
• ✅ Human Capital: The "30k Initiative" to certify 30,000 AI engineers by 2030, partnering with Coursera, Udacity, and local universities. The program offers fully funded scholarships covering machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing tracks. Additionally, the Ministry of Education is integrating AI literacy into the secondary school curriculum starting 2027.
• ✅ International Relations: Positioning Egypt as the AI gateway to Africa, leveraging the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa and Egypt's diplomatic network. The strategy includes bilateral AI cooperation agreements with France, China, India, and the UAE, involving technology transfer, joint research initiatives, and shared computing infrastructure.

🔹 Budget and Implementation Timeline

The total allocated budget for the strategy exceeds EGP 15 billion over the five-year period, with the first tranche of EGP 3.5 billion already approved for FY2025/2026. The phased rollout begins with governance and infrastructure in Year 1, followed by ecosystem development in Years 2-3, and scaling human capital programs in Years 3-5. Each ministry is required to submit quarterly progress reports to the National Council, ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the process.

🔹 International Partnerships

Egypt has secured several high-profile partnerships to accelerate implementation. Google has committed to establishing an AI research lab in Cairo's Smart Village, while Microsoft is providing Azure credits for government-backed AI projects. China's Huawei is collaborating on the data center infrastructure in the Suez Canal Zone, and France's Thales Group is contributing expertise in defense-related AI applications.

These partnerships are not just about technology transfer—they represent a shift in how Egypt is perceived on the global tech stage. The country is actively moving from being a consumer of AI technology to becoming a regional producer and exporter of AI solutions.

🔹 Educational Reform: The University Link

A critical component of the strategy is the "Consortium of AI Faculties," a new initiative linking the AI departments of Cairo University, Alexandria University, and Ain Shams University with industry leaders. This consortium aims to update curricula in real-time to match the evolving demands of the job market. No longer will students learn outdated algorithms; they will be working on live projects, using industry-standard tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch, and gaining credit for internships at accredited AI startups. The government is also funding the establishment of high-performance computing (HPC) labs in 15 public universities to ensure that students have access to the hardware necessary for deep learning experimentation.

🔹 Challenges Ahead: Infrastructure & Brain Drain

Despite the optimism, the strategy faces significant hurdles. Brain drain remains the most pressing concern. Top Egyptian talent is highly sought after by European and North American companies offering salaries that local firms often cannot match. The strategy addresses this not by trying to restrict movement, but by creating an ecosystem where talented engineers choose to stay—funding deep-tech research, offering tax incentives for senior engineers, and improving the overall quality of life in smart technology zones. Additionally, stable electricity availability for power-hungry data centers is a concern that the Ministry of Electricity is addressing through dedicated renewable energy grids powering the new tech zones.

🔹 Why It Matters for Developers and Founders

With a target contribution of 7.7% to GDP by 2030, this isn't just policy—it's an economic engine. For developers and founders, this signals massive government backing for AI-native solutions in healthcare, agriculture, and fintech. The regulatory sandbox means reduced risk for testing innovative products, while the open data initiative provides the raw material needed to train competitive models.

Startups that align their products with the strategy's priority sectors—particularly Arabic NLP, smart agriculture, and fintech automation—will find themselves in a favorable position for government contracts, grant funding, and accelerator programs. The window of opportunity is now, and the first movers will have a significant advantage.

"We are moving from potential to power," stated the Minister of Communications and Information Technology during the strategy launch event. "Egypt will not just adopt AI—it will shape how AI serves the developing world."