Can AI help Syria recover from civil war?

A Saudi- and Silicon Valley-backed project in Syria is testing whether AI can help speed up recovery in a nation reeling from years of civil war. The project, led by the Silicon Valley firm Aixplain, has a dual mission: helping Syria’s telecommunications ministry build the basic infrastructure that will support AI projects and developing AI pilots.

Aixplain is working on two projects to start:

• Software engineers at Syriatel, the nation’s largest telecom, are using an Aixplain-developed AI coding tool to develop new web and mobile services.
• The company is also developing an Arabic-speaking AI agent for customer service assistance that will serve Syriatel’s more than 12 mn subscribers.

Why it matters: The project’s basic premise is that AI has so accelerated the pace of global innovation that Syria can’t afford to ignore the technology as it reenters the global economy.

In a nutshell: “If you’re planning to revamp the whole infrastructure in the country, AI is going to be critical,” Aixplain CEO Hassan Sawaf (LinkedIn) tells EnterpriseAM. “Whether you’re Syria or anyone else, it’s a mistake to not use AI in my opinion, because what you can do with AI is always faster. If you’re not using AI, you’re flying blind.”

Details:

• Aixplain signed a memorandum of understanding with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in February, essentially to help the country develop AI infrastructure and services, including building infrastructure, securing data, and training Syrians in AI skills.
• The partnership with Syriatel, finalized at the Leap Conference in Riyadh last month, is the first concrete and publicized deal under that MoU. Sawaf declined to describe the terms of the deal.
• Aixplain is also working with Syrian private sector clients on AI projects, Sawaf says. He declined to name specific clients, but said the company is doing work with telecoms, banks, insurers, and in the education sector.

Roots in the country: Sawaf, whose parents emigrated from Syria to Germany in the 1960s, launched Aixplain in Silicon Valley in 2020 after stints at Amazon, Facebook AI, and eBay. The company also has a significant presence in Saudi Arabia.

The project highlights how AI differs from earlier technological revolutions — in theory at least. Two decades ago, when e-commerce was the hot new thing, urging a shattered country like Afghanistan to build an e-commerce sector would have made little sense without functioning banks and payment systems. (Syria, too, is struggling with those.) AI tools, by contrast, are far more accessible and the cost savings typically come much quicker.

“It’s a lot more intuitive for the average citizen,” Syriatel CEO Yasir Kahf (LinkedIn) tells EnterpriseAM.

Assessing the challenge: One big challenge Syria is facing is that the years its businesses lost to the civil war were also years that saw huge technological advances in the rest of the world, Kahf says. That makes anything Syriatel can do to speed up its modernization vital, he says.

“Instead of trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s tech, we’re trying to solve it with tomorrow’s tech,” he says. “These are projects that in a traditional programming environment would have been a one-and-a-half, two-year, three-year project, and we're now getting them done in two or three months.”

Not overambitious: “If they were going to run elections and they’d never had free elections before but now they want to turn it all over to AI, I would say, ‘There’s no way in hell that’s going to work.’ But they’re not being too ambitious. I would say the risk is much smaller,” Kentaro Toyama (LinkedIn), a University of Michigan professor who studies technology and international development and a well-known critic of overstating the benefits of new technology, tells EnterpriseAM.

BACKGROUND- Syria emerged from more than a decade of devastating civil war in December 2024 with the sudden downfall of its leader, Bashar Al Assad. The US began lifting crippling economic sanctions on the nation in 2025, after which the new government, led by President Ahmed Al Sharaa, began courting international investors. The World Bank puts the cost of Syrian reconstruction at a jaw-dropping USD 216 bn — that’s about 10x Syria’s GDP.

To be sure, there are significant infrastructure barriers to broad AI adoption in Syria. The country has only a limited amount of fiber-optic cable carrying internet traffic, though that will increase with the deployment of SilkLink, a USD 800 mn joint Saudi-Syrian project that aims to build a 4.5k-kilometer fiber-optic network across Syria and link it with Europe and Asia.

The country is also short on GPUs, the high-powered computer chips that power most AI work. Current AI deployments rely, at least partly, on GPUs in Saudi Arabia and Europe, Sawaf says. The nation has made “data embassy deals” with those countries so it retains legal control over data processed there, he says.

To cap it all off, the country is short on energy. Electricity availability in most provinces is now between 18 and 20 hours per day, up from just a few hours per day previously, Energy Minister Mohammad Al Bashir said last month, per state news agency Sana.

“Infrastructure doesn’t exist like we’re used to in the West and that’s a charter we have, to help them bring their technology and their processes to where they should be in 2026,” Sawaf says. Many Syrian companies are also experimenting with cloud-based AI tools hosted by Amazon and Microsoft, he says.

Analysts consulted by EnterpriseAM generally praised the Syrian AI pilots for not being overambitious and focusing on easy cost savings. But they also warned that relying too much on AI could backfire — and that deploying AI or other technology can’t substitute for the hard work of building the government and private sector institutions that Syria will need to build a vibrant economy.

The cemetery of tech failures: “There’s a cemetery's worth of projects where somebody thought, ‘Oh, I’ll bring some digital technology in and it will solve this government service problem or this social problem or this political problem.’ And technology is never the thing that changes those kinds of things,” Toyama says.

Rules of the road: In addition to building tech infrastructure, the Syrian government should focus on ensuring transparency around how AI is used and governed and on creating strong legal rules around AI, experts say. That will help reduce international concerns that AI investments now could be used to fund a future surveillance apparatus, they add.

The government should also be thoughtful about the way AI implementations could contribute to rising unemployment. That’s a concern across the globe, but further unemployment could be extra destabilizing in a nation that’s still trying to get its footing after so many years of crisis. Syria’s youth unemployment rate was about 33% in 2025, according to World Bank data. Analysts often look at youth unemployment as a key measure of the risk of unrest in frontier markets.

“The investment in digital infrastructure in this area can have huge beneficial impacts for Syria if done correctly,” Nadia Farra (LinkedIn), a former US government official focused on the Middle East and technology and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, tells EnterpriseAM. “And by correctly, I mean all the really boring, unsexy things you have to do to make sustainable economic growth happen.”