Huawei Bids 2,008 AI Chips for Egypt Government Data Center Project
Huawei Technologies Co. has submitted a tender to build artificial intelligence data centers for the Egyptian government, proposing to export 1,408 of its top end Ascend 950 series chips for an AI training cloud, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News and people familiar with the matter. The bid, which also covers a further 600 chips for two inference clusters, has drawn concern in Washington, the same reporting said.
What Huawei Has Proposed
In its tender offer, Huawei, described as China’s biggest competitor to Nvidia Corp., proposed exporting 1,408 of its top end Ascend 950 series chips to build an AI training cloud for the Egyptian government. The bid also includes 600 additional chips, drawn from either the Ascend 950 series or the earlier 910B model, to run two inference clusters, the hardware needed to operate AI models once they have been trained. On our calculation, that puts the total proposed chip shipment at 2,008 units. A 12 month plan to build the infrastructure was laid out in the documents reviewed.
A Two Decade Foothold
Huawei has had a presence in Egypt for more than two decades, per Bloomberg’s Next China newsletter, which reported that Cairo wants an AI data center and that Huawei is eager to help build it. The value of the proposed contract and the specific government entity that issued the tender was not disclosed in the reporting. An accompanying photograph showed Huawei’s Ascend 910 chip on display at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July.
Washington’s Response
The bid is drawing concern in Washington, where US officials are working to assemble a counteroffer, the same reporting said.
Why it matters
Egypt has been a Huawei telecoms and cloud client for more than two decades, and a tender for thousands of advanced Ascend AI training chips would mark a shift from services contracts into large scale AI infrastructure hardware, on our reading. A confirmed award at this scale would be among the larger publicly reported AI hardware tenders in Egypt to date and a significant addition to Huawei’s existing regional data center and cloud business.
Outlook
The matter remains at the tender and counteroffer stage, with no confirmed decision by the Egyptian government and no disclosed timeline for one.
Sources: Bloomberg.
