Tunisia and UAE data centre plans emphasise energy efficiency

Details: Vaughan O'Grady; Category: Energy & Sustainability; 09 February 2026; 7997 views

Recent data centre news from the Middle East and North Africa includes announcements from the UAE and Tunisia that, as so often recently, focus on energy efficiency.

Late last week the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, along with Khazna Data Centres, an advanced data centres provider in the country, and Agility, an investor in global and regional businesses, announced a pilot to implement AI technology from a company called Phaidra to accelerate energy efficiency across data centres and district cooling operations in the UAE.

Phaidra develops AI software that optimises power, cooling and operational efficiency in data centres and other energy-intensive infrastructure.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) establishes a framework for collaboration to enhance the energy efficiency and economic performance of energy-intensive digital infrastructure.

As part of the initiative, the pilot will evaluate the deployment of advanced control system technology developed by Phaidra. The partners explain that Phaidra’s AI agents orchestrate the complex power, cooling and workload management systems that underpin modern AI data centres for peak tokens-per-watt efficiency — which is becoming ever more important as AI workloads drive higher energy and performance requirements.

This initiative builds upon Khazna’s existing collaboration with AI computing specialist Nvidia to accelerate AI infrastructure development across the MEA region. Khazna says it is designing and building next-generation AI factories using the Nvidia DSX Blueprint, an open and comprehensive reference architecture for large-scale AI infrastructure.

Khazna says its hyperscale operational expertise will support the deployment and evaluation of Phaidra’s reinforcement learning agents across selected data centre campuses. The pilot will assess the potential to significantly reduce cooling energy consumption, increase IT capacity, and enhance the resilience and reliability of mission-critical AI infrastructure, particularly in high ambient-temperature environments.

This multi-party collaboration enables the Ministry, Khazna, and Agility to assess opportunities to scale AI-enabled optimisation solutions more broadly across the UAE.

Meanwhile, earlier last week, SoleCrypt, a developer of sustainable digital infrastructure, and Schneider Electric, which describes itself as the global leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, announced the signing of an MoU to study and co-develop next generation sustainable AI data centres in Tunisia. These facilities are designed to host intensive artificial intelligence compute workloads while maintaining a low carbon and water footprint.

The partnership aims to position Tunisia as a strategic platform for sustainable computing serving Europe and the MENA region, building on the country’s key advantages in renewable energy, international connectivity through submarine fibre optic cables, and a fast growing digital ecosystem.

Under this collaboration, SoleCrypt will provide strategic sites across Tunisia with strong connectivity to the national power grid and telecommunications infrastructure, enabling sub-10-millisecond latency to Europe.

Schneider Electric will act as a key technology advisor, providing AI data centre reference architectures co-developed with Nvidia, as well as medium and low-voltage electrification solutions, secure power systems, liquid cooling and intelligent infrastructure management.