Huawei bid to build Egypt’s AI data centres, and Washington is scrambling

Huawei has offered Egypt 1,408 Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud and 600 additional chips for inference clusters, proposing a 12-month build that would total 2,008 processors—far fewer than typical Western deployments. The bid, partnered with blacklisted iFlytek, prompted the U.S. State Department to seek a rival consortium of Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft, citing export-control leverage over AI chip shipments.