Huawei bid to build Egypt's AI data centres, US counters

This article was published on August 26, 2026 Huawei has bid to build AI data centres for the Egyptian government, offering 2,008 Ascend chips and a 12-month build. The State Department is trying to assemble a counter-bid from Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft before Xi Jinping arrives in Cairo next week. Huawei at Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Spain Huawei has bid to build AI data centres for the Egyptian government. The US State Department is now trying to assemble a rival consortium from Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft. The tender offer proposes exporting 1,408 of Huawei’s top-end Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud. A further 600, either the same chips or the older 910B, would run two inference clusters. Huawei set out a 12-month build. Mackenzie Hawkins reported the bid for Bloomberg, from people familiar with the matter and documents she reviewed. Gao Yuan and Matt Day contributed. Huawei has spent more than a year trying to sell these chips abroad without a completed deal. Last year it approached buyers in the Gulf and Southeast Asia with a couple of thousand processors. It offered only its second-best model, because production of the better 910C was too low. This