Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Cairo on Sept. 1 for his first visit to Egypt in a decade. He and President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi agreed to “expand cooperation” on artificial intelligence and technology.
Ahead of Xi’s visit, Bloomberg reported a Huawei bid to build Egypt’s data center. Washington responded with a rival offer. And after Xi left Cairo, Egypt’s minister of communications and information technology, Raafat Hindi, met with a U.S. consortium of data center developers, according to Egyptian state media.
Soon after, Egypt announced the country’s first large-scale AI data center — a 200-megawatt facility worth $1 billion, built on Nvidia technology from the United States.
Broad but Shallow?
China has made great strides in the Middle East North Africa, particularly in promoting its technologies among countries in the region. But as the Nvidia deal suggests, Chinese technology engagement across MENA is broader than it is deep.
MBN’s China Tracker found dozens of agreements between Chinese tech giants in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since 2018.
For example, Huawei signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia in 2020 to develop AI that can read and process Arabic script and speech. Alibaba Cloud is working in the kingdom on smart-city projects.
SenseTime, a facial recognition company based in Hong Kong, worked with a Saudi partner on AI systems for Riyadh Season, the country’s flagship entertainment festival. Search giant Baidu signed cloud and self-driving research partnerships with Emirati and Saudi entities in 2023.
The terms of many of these deals haven’t been publicly disclosed. The largest contract that has been is a $206 million SenseTime joint venture announced in 2022.
Much of the activity sits in surveillance and smart-city applications, not frontier compute. U.S. companies are doing deals on a different order of magnitude.
Last November, the U.S. Commerce Department authorized G42, the Abu Dhabi state-backed AI firm at the center of the UAE’s tech ambitions, and HUMAIN, an AI company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, to purchase the equivalent of up to 35,000 Nvidia GB300 Blackwell chips.
Each in a deal is valued at roughly $1 billion, although contingent on both companies meeting security and reporting requirements set by the U.S.
HUMAIN has signed tech infrastructure agreements with U.S. companies AMD, Cisco, SpacexAI and others totaling nearly 3 gigawatts of planned compute. Saudi Arabia in return has pledged to invest $1 trillion in the United States, and UAE has committed $1.4 trillion over a decade.
Borrowed Foundations
That’s not to say the competition between the U.S. and China over tech in the MENA region isn’t real.
Xiaomeng Lu, director for geo-technology at Eurasia Group, said Gulf countries now can choose between products offered by the two great powers.
The governments of the region want their own AI capacity, but “not many technology communities are capable of developing a meaningful alternative to a U.S. foundational model or Chinese foundational model,” Lu said.
The workaround is to build upon work done in the U.S. and China.
“You put multiple foundational models at the bottom layer and then you build your own application,” Lu said, tuning it to local values, culture and language.
K2 Think, the reasoning model from UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, was built on Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model and runs on U.S.-made Cerebras hardware. Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN is anchored almost entirely in American partnerships, in part, Lu said, because of the country’s security alliance with the U.S.
A Region of ‘Vital Importance’
Even so, the Middle East and North Africa remains a vital area for China to showcase what its technologies can do.
The Gulf in particular “is of vital importance for China’s tech outreach,” James Kynge, senior research fellow for China and the world at Chatham House, told Semafor. What China is doing there allows Beijing to demonstrate that its tech is as good or better than the United States’, he told the news outlet.
Piero Tozzi, senior director of China policy at the America First Policy Institute, argues the stakes are larger than any single deal.
Beijing is “seeking to set global technological standards from telecommunications to artificial intelligence,” he told MBN in an email. “The nation that sets the standards sets the rules.”
China’s DeepSeek’s V4 model, released in late April, serves user queries on Huawei’s Ascend architecture — reportedly the first frontier-class model built around Chinese silicon, though it appears to have relied heavily on Nvidia hardware for training.
Alibaba Cloud opened a second Dubai data center last year. Saudi Arabia signed memoranda of understanding with the Chinese firms BOE, Kyland and Tsinghua Unigroup covering semiconductors and AI.
Chinese firms are competing, and often winning, in the region’s AI and tech spaces, providing e-commerce apps, cloud services, industrial applications and surveillance systems, as well as some of the underlying infrastructure that makes it all run.
But as Cairo suggests, the biggest deals may still be reserved for the U.S. for now.
