Data-center law in Egypt

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-02

Egypt has no data-center-specific land-use, environmental-review, energy-grid, water-utilities, construction, or air-operations statute; a data center is sited and permitted under Egypt's general regulatory apparatus rather than a dedicated regime.

The one dimension with a citable instrument is investment incentives: the Investment Law No. 72 of 2017, administered by the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI), places a project licensed inside a public or private free zone outside Egypt's ordinary tax and duty laws and exempts the goods it trades and the equipment its licensed activity needs from customs duties and VAT, charging instead a duty set as a percentage of commodity value or of revenue, plus a capped annual services fee.

The same Law's Technological Zones regime (Art. 32) is the only place Egyptian statute names data centres outright, as one of the communications and information-technology activities the Prime Minister may license a zone for, but it is an investment-licensing regime rather than a siting or utilities one.

Separately, telecommunications regulatory approval from the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority under the Telecommunications Regulation Law No. 10 of 2003 is reported to be required before a company may offer data-center services, though this is a telecommunications-licensing requirement rather than a siting, environmental, or utilities permit, and does not fit any of this topic's registered law families.

As of the visit date, Egypt's government had only announced a national data-center and cloud-computing strategy (including a national investment map of sites, utilities, and power supply) without enacting siting-specific legislation.