Artificial intelligence powers Egypt’s USD 27bn city project
Egypt is doubling down on large-scale, technology-driven urban development, with the announcement of The Spine, a USD 27bn mixed-use city to be built by Talaat Moustafa Group (TMG). According to Reuters, the project will span approximately 2.4 million m2 and be developed in partnership with the National Bank of Egypt, positioning it as one of the most ambitious urban investments in the region.
Framed as a Special Investment Zone integrated with TMG’s Madinaty development, The Spine is expected to combine residential, commercial, hospitality and entertainment spaces within a single continuous environment. But beyond its scale, the project stands out for its ambition to function as an AI-powered smart city from the ground up.
At roughly 1.4 trillion Egyptian pounds in investment, the development is projected to generate approximately 818 billion Egyptian pounds in tax revenues over time and create more than 55,000 direct jobs, alongside hundreds of thousands of indirect roles, according to Reuters.
AI infrastructure at city scale
Unlike earlier smart city initiatives that retrofitted digital layers onto existing infrastructure, The Spine is being designed as a fully integrated digital-physical system. Mohamed Hamed, chief technology information officer in Egypt, describes a deeply embedded AI architecture underpinning city operations.
At its core is a city-wide digital twin powered by real-time geospatial simulation technologies such as Nvidia Omniverse and Cesium, enabling continuous modelling of traffic, utilities and emergency scenarios. “The twin ingests live IoT data and runs ‘what if’ scenarios, such as a concert letting out during a storm, allowing predictive, rather than reactive, city management,” Hamed said.
This capability is supported by a distributed edge computing model comprising five edge data centres and more than 200 micro-edge nodes that handle low-latency AI workloads. The infrastructure is designed to process millions of real-time events per second, using streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka and federated data architectures to avoid central bottlenecks.