Huawei Offers Top AI Chips to Egypt, US Prepares Counterbid

Huawei’s bid to build AI infrastructure for the Egyptian government has prompted Washington to explore a rival U.S. technology consortium, turning Cairo into a new front in the contest between American and Chinese artificial intelligence suppliers.

The State Department has approached Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft about assembling a competing offer after learning of Huawei’s proposal, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Huawei’s tender would place its Ascend processors at the core of Egyptian government AI infrastructure and could give the Chinese group an important overseas customer for chips it has struggled to export at scale.

Huawei Offers Top-End Ascend Chips

Huawei proposed supplying 1,408 Ascend 950-series accelerators for an AI training cloud, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

A further 600 processors, either Ascend 950 chips or the earlier 910B model, would power two inference clusters designed to run trained AI models.

The company laid out a 12-month construction plan.

The total deployment of 2,008 processors remains small compared with the computing capacity routinely used by leading Western technology companies.

Under typical training configurations, the Huawei chips would provide capability broadly comparable with several hundred of Nvidia’s most advanced commercially available processors.

But the strategic value could be greater than the project's scale.

A successful contract could represent the first known export of Huawei’s Ascend accelerators after more than a year of attempts to find overseas buyers.

Huawei has previously marketed processors in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia.

Its Egyptian bid is more ambitious because it includes the 950-series, which is more powerful than the 910C.

Washington Looks for a Counteroffer

The Trump administration responded by contacting major U.S. technology companies over a possible alternative proposal.

“Egypt is one of dozens of countries with whom we are speaking about U.S. technology leadership on artificial intelligence,” a State Department spokesperson told Bloomberg.

The U.S. “stands ready to partner with countries on AI development and deployment in ways that respect sovereignty and expand capabilities,” the spokesperson added.

Washington has also warned that use of certain Huawei accelerators without U.S. authorization could lead to legal penalties, although it is unclear whether that guidance has been raised directly with Cairo.

Advanced AI chip shipments to Egypt have required U.S. approval since 2023, giving Washington the ability to impose conditions through export licensing.

Egypt Becomes a Test Case

Egypt has not historically been a major commercial market for Nvidia or AMD, nor a central focus of recent U.S. AI diplomacy.

Huawei’s bid has pushed the country higher on Washington’s agenda.

Egypt’s second national AI strategy aims for artificial intelligence to contribute 7.7 percent of gross domestic product by 2030. Developing that capacity requires imported processors because the country does not produce its own AI chips.

Huawei’s proposal also includes a partnership with iFlytek, which, like Huawei, has been blacklisted by the U.S. since 2019.

The companies’ proposed applications include vehicle and individual recognition linked to a national population database, as well as broader “situation awareness” tools.

A Wider Competition for Emerging Markets

The contest in Egypt reflects a broader struggle over which technology ecosystem will supply emerging AI markets.

The Trump administration has developed an export-promotion program intended to combine U.S. AI technology with possible government financing for countries that might otherwise turn to lower-cost Chinese alternatives.

The State Department pointed to that program when asked about the prospective U.S. offer for Egypt, but did not say whether federal financing would be available.

For Huawei, a victory would validate both overseas demand for its most advanced AI chips and its ability to supply them despite U.S. restrictions on key production equipment.

For Washington, the tender will test whether export controls can be matched with competitive commercial alternatives in markets where Chinese technology companies are expanding.