Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has held fresh talks with Microsoft covering the next phase of AI cooperation, with discussions centred on integrating Egypt’s domestically developed Arabic large language model Karnak with Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure in the country.
Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence
The meeting, held between Deputy Minister for Infrastructure and Digital Transformation Raafat Hindi and Microsoft officials, also reviewed implementation of the existing MoU between the ministry and Microsoft Egypt — which commits to training and upskilling 100,000 young professionals and government digital transformation staff in AI technologies. The talks covered expanding the scope of cooperation to include applications developed by Egypt’s Applied Innovation Centre, particularly around deploying AI-powered solutions in public services.
Separately, Egypt’s Minister of Supply and Internal Trade Sherif Farouk held discussions with Microsoft officials on deploying AI and big data analytics to modernise the ministry’s subsidised services infrastructure — targeting improvements in database accuracy, decision-support systems, and the management of Egypt’s food commodity and subsidy systems.
Both engagements sit within Egypt’s National AI Strategy 2025–2030, which targets training 30,000 AI specialists, establishing 250 AI-driven companies, and raising the ICT sector’s contribution to GDP to 7.7% by 2030. Karnak, Egypt’s nationally developed Arabic foundation model, currently ranks as the highest-performing Arabic LLM in the 30–40 billion parameter category.
