Egypt Plans Five to Seven Data Centers in Push for $12B Digital Exports
The communications ministry wants 200,000 new tech jobs, 30 million locally made phones a year and 8% of GDP from ICT by 2030.
Egypt will build between five and seven large data centers over the next four to five years, part of a push to reach $12 billion in annual digital exports and create 200,000 jobs by 2030. Communications and Information Technology Minister Raafat Hendy set out the targets on Wednesday during the Digital Egypt session of the Egypt 2026 Forum.
Some of the data centers are expected to be running and serving international customers by 2030. Work on the rest would continue past that date. The ministry also wants locally manufactured mobile phones to reach 30 million devices a year by 2030, and is aiming for the information and communications technology sector to supply 8% of gross domestic product.
The plan sits on top of more than $10.9 billion, or EGP 600 billion, of public and private telecoms investment over the past decade, a figure a Cabinet statement attributed to Hendy. That money went into network upgrades, fiber expansion and wider mobile coverage. Roughly 20,000 government buildings are now connected to fiber, and about 5.5 million fiber lines have been installed. The ministry intends to add a million lines a year.
Operators have added more than 3,000 mobile towers annually and have spent over $6 billion in ten years acquiring spectrum. On the international side, Egypt has added ten new submarine cables in the past decade, six of them still under construction, and is developing additional landing stations and routes to keep global traffic flowing through the country.
By 2030 the ministry wants fiber reaching more than 55% of households and 5G coverage in every governorate.
Services, outsourcing and skills
The Digital Egypt platform, launched in 2022, carries about 250 services today. The target is 400 by 2030, with users growing to between 30 million and 35 million citizens. Outsourcing already runs at roughly 280 centers employing 200,000 people, and about 80% of that work is sold to export markets. Twenty-four innovation centers have been set up to support startups, build technical skills and train young people. More than two million citizens have gone through digital skills programs over the past decade.
Hendy framed the strategy around digital sovereignty, which he said rests on five pillars: sovereign infrastructure, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data protection and national talent, alongside expanding technology industries and diversifying supply chains. Sovereignty, he said, is not isolation from global markets. It means independent and sustainable control over critical infrastructure, data and strategic services.
The AI component comes with a physical constraint. A World Economic Forum report estimates that AI could unlock $1 trillion in economic and sustainability value across the Middle East and North Africa by 2030, but says getting there depends on faster grid connections and on managing the energy and water that data centers consume. Egypt's own AI goal is narrower: enabling 250 startups to build AI applications.
For a country already earning most of its outsourcing revenue abroad, the test is whether power, bandwidth and skills arrive at the same time. The towers and the cables are partly in place. The electricity is the open question.
