Tunisia

Name: Tunisia
Address: TN

Tunisia has a 2004 data protection law that requires regulator authorisation for transfers abroad, and a Chinese-donated academic supercomputer entered testing in July 2026.

Tunisia's personal data law dates from 2004 and is described as outdated in local press. International transfers need authorisation from the data protection authority. A national AI strategy has been announced repeatedly but local reporting says it has not been officially published. Compute is mostly academic and operator-led: the El Khawarizmi Computing Centre at Manouba University began a test phase for a supercomputer on 23 July 2026, and Orange Tunisie opened a Tier III data centre in Sousse in May 2025. Grid context is a gas-dependent system with a renewables target.

AI policy and activity

A National AI Strategy 2021 to 2025 is listed by a regulation tracker as superseded, and an interministerial memorandum was signed on 19 February 2022. Reported by La Presse on 30 August 2026: authorities announced a national AI strategy in late 2023 but it has not been officially published. We found no primary strategy text.

Power and grid

Reported (2022 to 2023 data, may be stale). About 97 per cent of electricity came from fossil fuels, mainly natural gas, with a 2030 renewables target of 35 per cent and a 1,700 MW renewables tender launched in January 2023. No data centre specific grid rules found.

Data centres and compute

Data centres and compute
Site	Where	Status	Notes and source
Orange Tunisie Sousse data centre Orange Tunisie	Kalaa Kebira, Sousse	Operating	Reported. Tier III standard, 1,000 square metres, inaugurated 7 May 2025. No power capacity published in the source. (source)
Carthage Data Center and EO Data Center (Enfidha) Tunisie Telecom	Tunisia	Operating	Reported. Named in La Presse, 30 August 2026, as existing data centres. No capacity given. (source)

Rules and programmes

Rules and programmes
Instrument	Kind	Status	What it does
Organic Law No. 2004-63 on the protection of personal data Read the cited source	Law	In force from 27 July 2004	Reported. Law-firm digest. The INPDP authorises international transfers and the destination must offer adequate protection. It does not mandate data localisation as such. A later decree-law (2023-17, March 2023) is reported to add cybersecurity audit duties and cloud provider classifications.
National AI Strategy 2021 to 2025 Read the cited source	Policy	Ended	Reported. Tracker page marks it superseded as of 10 September 2026 and lists cloud and high-performance computing as a pillar. La Presse (30 August 2026) says a national strategy has not been officially published, so the status is unclear.
El Khawarizmi Computing Centre supercomputer Read the cited source	Programme	In force from 23 July 2026	Reported. Test phase began 23 July 2026 and is to last more than three months. Described as a Chinese donation worth 10.6 million dollars, free for academic researchers. The article gives no FLOPS figure; the claim of third most powerful in Africa is unverified.

Checked on 3 October 2026 and due for review by 1 January 2027. Many sources are trade press or law-firm summaries rather than official texts, and statuses such as reported or unconfirmed are shown as the source gives them. This is a summary, not legal advice. If something is wrong or out of date, tell us.

Cite this page

ComputeFinder. (2026, October 3). Tunisia: AI and compute. ComputeFinder. Retrieved November 14, 2026, from https://computefinder.net/countries/tunisia

BibTeX

@misc{computefinder_countries_tunisia,
  title        = {Tunisia: AI and compute},
  author       = {{ComputeFinder}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://computefinder.net/entity/cf-ctry-0071}},
  number       = {cf-ctry-0071},
  note         = {Page last checked 3 October 2026. Retrieved 14 November 2026.}
}

Stable ID: cf-ctry-0071. Permanent link: https://computefinder.net/entity/cf-ctry-0071. It keeps working if this page moves.

Page link: https://computefinder.net/countries/tunisia. Page last checked 3 October 2026. Retrieved 14 November 2026. Cite the provider or the primary source for any fact you rely on.

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