Sovereign Infrastructure for AI

Co-organized by AIDC² Expo, AICTO and Smart Africa

7 November 2026, Cairo

Africa and the Arab region cannot benefit fully from AI without building their own infrastructure and mastering their data centers, compute, networks and data. Today, most of the data and models used on the continent are hosted and trained outside its borders.

This dependency creates three concrete problems:

• Data sovereignty

  Public, financial and health data fall outside national legal frameworks.

• Cost and latency

  Access to compute (GPUs) remains limited and expensive for governments, researchers and startups.

• Relevance

  Models are poorly adapted to African and Arab languages, contexts and priorities.

AIDC² Expo 2026, held alongside the 30th Cairo ICT under the patronage of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), puts AI infrastructure and its impact on Africa and the Arab region, including FinTech and HealthTech, at the heart of its program.

Objectives

Discuss a joint Arab-Africa roadmap for sovereign, pooled and interoperable AI infrastructure.

1. Build a shared picture of existing AI compute capacity and readiness (including data centers, compute/GPU capacity, energy, connectivity and data protection frameworks) and identify the key infrastructure gaps.
2. Identify and discuss workable pooling models: regional sovereign clouds, shared compute centers, federated GPU access, public-private partnerships.
3. Agree on common principles for data governance and data localization.