Machinepower Index / Dossiers / Egypt
Rank 36–45 across the scoring rules tested. How this is tested
Egypt
Compute Rentier — For nations whose main asset is the ground itself, meaning cheap clean power, land and stability: host other nations' compute and turn geography into rent, jobs and relevance.
How the Score, Potential and bottleneck cost are worked out: methodology.
The three layers
Energy, grids, data centres and silicon — the physical capacity to run models at scale.
Epoch AI records no large AI clusters or data centres here yet.
Models, alignment capability, standards influence and the talent that produces them.
The capacity to wire AI into the state and the economy while holding public consent.
Where the score comes from
| Layer | Sub-dimension | Basis | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watts | Planning & Permitting | Assessed | 6.2 |
| Firm Power Capacity | Dataset | 5.3 | |
| Sovereign Compute | Assessed | 2.0 | |
| Hardware & Silicon Access | Dataset | 2.0 | |
| Weights | Frontier Model Output | Dataset | 3.0 |
| Alignment Capability | Assessed | 3.6 | |
| Regulatory Standing | Dataset | 6.8 | |
| Talent Density | Assessed | 4.8 | |
| Will | Policy Capacity | Dataset | 10.0 |
| Public Sector Adoption | Dataset | 6.0 | |
| Workforce Transition | Dataset | 5.1 | |
| Public Trust | Assessed | 9.0 |
Assessed marks a measurement we judged rather than took from a dataset: 5 of the 12 here.
Sources
Cheap land and power and a state that builds quickly, offset by load-shedding in 2023–24.
View source →An updated AI strategy and the OECD principles; no safety body.
View source →No system on the June 2026 TOP500 and no compute controlled by the state, universities or firms in Epoch AI; set at the floor.
View source →Stanford does not count Egypt. Estimated from 1.6 million GitHub developers and Oxford Insights' diffusion pillar, calibrated on the nations Stanford counts.
View source →Feeds governance and public-sector adoption; policy capacity is listed separately.
View source →Ipsos does not cover it. Mapped to the Ipsos scale through the 28 countries both surveys cover.
View source →Feeds workforce, rescaled across 173 economies.
View source →Fossil, nuclear, hydro and other dispatchable plant; averaged with generation for firm power.
View source →Bottlenecks
These hold Egypt below its Potential. Its two lowest scores cost it the most: sovereign compute at 2.0 (part of Watts) and hardware & silicon access at 2.0 (part of Watts).
Assessment
Egypt sits on the cable routes between Europe, Asia and Africa and has cheap land and power, but nothing on the TOP500, few models and power cuts as recent as 2024.
The art of the possible
Hosting is the near prize: cables and cheap power make Egypt a natural landing point for compute serving three continents.
Strategic play — Compute Rentier
Rent the crossing: host compute where the cables land, and tie each campus to new plants that end the outages.
Leverage — the nearest position. Fisher's Alexandria again: much of the internet traffic between Europe and Asia crosses Egypt by cable, through landings the state controls. It is a key others must pass, though Cairo has never turned it.
Open Egypt in the live Index → — every source behind every number, and the comparison tool.