Egypt to build $1b data center with Nvidia

Egypt announced on Wednesday it’s going ahead with building its first ever AI data center, backed by the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, Nvidia.

The data center is planned to be a 200 megawatt facility worth $1 billion built with Nvidia technology, according to Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

The facility is planned to be built in a three-year phase with the first phase planned to to start with a 20 megawatt facility worth $200 million built by Vodafone Business, Elsewedy Electric, and Cassava Technologies, the latter being Nvidia’s main partner in Africa.

The project with Nvidia came to fruition after Xi Jinping’s first visit to Egypt in decade last week; in his visit, the Chinese Premier reportedly pushed a bid from Huawei to build a data center in Egypt, Xi left the meeting with Sisi agreeing to “expand cooperation” on AI and tech but did not sign anything concrete.

Washington saw the move and pushed a rival offer from American companies Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft which Egypt accepted; with Egypt’s communication minister stating that he met with an unnamed “U.S. consortium of data center developers” eager to make the country a “regional data center hub”.

It remains to be seen how Egypt’s power grid will handle the project as AI data centers notoriously consume up to five times more electricity than their regular counterparts.