News

Abu Dhabi’s Khazna Announces $250M Data Center In Egypt

The new facility will be built at Maadi Technology Park in Cairo and is expected to have an IT load capacity of 25 megawatts.

Published

3 years ago

May 8, 2023

Nour Nasir

abu dhabi's khazna announces $250 million data center in egypt

Abu Dhabi-based Khazna Data Centers, one of the largest operators of its kind in the Middle East, is planning an expansion into Egypt with a new $250 million data center.

The facility will be built at Cairo’s Maadi Technology Park and is expected to have a capacity of 25 megawatts of IT load. The expansion addresses underserved markets in the MENA region, Hassan Al Naqbi explained in a recent interview.

Also Read: Emirates Just Unveiled The World’s First Robot Check-In Assistant

“We realize that to become regional and global, we must step outside the UAE,” Al Naqbi noted. “Egypt is sitting in a very good geographical location between Europe and the Middle East, sort of a gateway between East and West. A country like Egypt with a huge population has a lot of potential”.

hassan al naqbi ceo khazna data centers

Khazna was created in a 2021 merger between the Etisalat Group and Abu Dhabi AI company G42. The company currently operates 12 data centers in the UAE. It plans to double this figure over the next few years and move into other MENA markets, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Kuwait.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.