TRIPOLI
More than a decade after the 2011 revolution fractured Libya's institutions, the country's technology sector is producing a genuinely unusual news cycle in 2026: a new transcontinental submarine cable, a national artificial-intelligence strategy with hard numeric targets, and a central bank actively expanding electronic wallets to foreign residents rather than restricting capital flows. None of this erases Libya's continued political fragmentation, but it does mark a distinct shift from the reactive, security-driven telecom policy of the past decade toward a state-led digital agenda with published multi-year targets. The story that emerges from 2025-26 developments is one of infrastructure catching up with an already digitally engaged population, and institutions — the Central Bank of Libya, the General Information Authority, and state telecom holding company LPTIC — moving in parallel to build the rails for a modern digital economy.
The Medusa Cable: Libya's New Route to Europe
The single most consequential infrastructure event for Libya's digital economy in the past year has been the Medusa submarine cable system, an 8,700-kilometre subsea network built to connect eleven countries around the Mediterranean basin — Portugal, Morocco, Spain, France, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, and Libya — via two Libyan landing points at Tripoli and Benghazi. Spearheaded on the Libyan side by the state-owned Libyan Post, Telecommunications and Information Technology Company (LPTIC), the cable was formally inaugurated in Libya on May 11, 2025, with full landing and integration targeted for completion by the end of 2025 and full operational capacity extending into 2026. Medusa's technical specifications are substantial for a market Libya's size: the system is designed around 24 fibre pairs, each carrying 20 terabits per second, for a total design capacity of 480 terabits per second. For a country that has historically depended on a small number of aging cable connections and relied heavily on satellite and cross-border terrestrial links, direct high-capacity connectivity to Spain, France, and Egypt is expected to meaningfully cut wholesale IP transit costs and open the door to reselling bandwidth transit to landlocked markets further south in the Sahel. Industry coverage has also flagged a second wave of planned Mediterranean cable investment — including studies tied to Meta's Project Waterworth — that could eventually support data-centre colocation clusters around Libya's Misrata port, adding neutral peering points that would further reshape the economics of Libya's telecom market.
A Population Already Online
Libya's digital transformation push is not building connectivity from zero — it is layering new infrastructure and services onto a population that is already heavily online by regional standards. DataReportal's Digital 2026 Libya report found 6.62 million individuals using the internet at the end of 2025, translating to an online penetration rate of 88.5% of the population, a figure that places Libya well ahead of many of its North African and Sahelian neighbours. Mobile connectivity is similarly saturated: World Bank-sourced data cited in market analyses put mobile subscriptions at roughly 193 per 100 people as of 2022, reflecting the heavy multi-SIM usage patterns common in markets where operator competition and pricing push users to carry more than one active line. That existing base of engaged, connected users is precisely what has made Libya an attractive market for the government's newer digital-identity and AI-enabled service ambitions — the constraint has increasingly been institutional and infrastructural capacity rather than consumer demand.
A National AI Strategy With Numeric Targets
In a signal of how far Libya's digital policy has moved beyond basic connectivity, the government has published a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy covering 2026 through 2030, following an earlier national AI policy announcement in May 2024. The strategy sets specific, measurable targets rather than aspirational language: it calls for 80% of government organisations to be using AI-enabled services, for 50% of government transactions to be automated, and for national digital identity to be activated for 70% of the population by the end of the strategy period. That digital-identity component connects directly to a separate initiative already underway: Libya's General Information Authority has been running pilots for the LY-DNID national digital identity system, explicitly linked in official documentation to the broader National Digital Transformation Strategy 2023–2030. Together, the AI strategy's automation targets and the digital-ID rollout represent an attempt to build the technical backbone — verified identity, government cloud infrastructure, and automated service delivery — that the country's fragmented, often paper-based public administration has historically lacked. Independent assessments of Libya's digital transformation progress describe fiber-optic route upgrades, new data centres, and expanding mobile connectivity as mutually reinforcing developments accelerating through late 2025 into 2026, even as they caution that implementation capacity, rather than strategy design, remains the central risk to these targets.
The Central Bank Pushes Financial Inclusion Through E-Wallets
Perhaps the most tangible evidence of Libya's digital pivot has come from its financial sector regulator. The Central Bank of Libya used the second Libya International Electronic Payment Exhibition (EPAIX 2026) to launch new international payment services and SoftPOS technology — software that turns NFC-enabled smartphones into authorised point-of-sale terminals without dedicated card-reading hardware — explicitly framed as advancing the country's national digital-transformation agenda. In March 2026, the Central Bank of Libya went further, approving electronic-wallet access for foreign residents for the first time and introducing formal transfer limits designed to balance financial inclusion against money-laundering and capital-flight risk: individual-to-individual transfers were capped at 50,000 Libyan dinars, with a higher 100,000-dinar ceiling for individual-to-company transfers. The Bank of Commerce and Development moved quickly to become the first Libyan bank to launch an e-wallet product specifically for expatriate residents and foreign workers, a population that has historically been underserved by a banking system built around Libyan national documentation. Commercial banks more broadly have been encouraged by the central bank to build out mobile banking platforms enabling remote account access, and coverage of the sector points to a growing recognition — inside both the regulator and the commercial banks — that interoperable payment systems, shared data frameworks, and robust digital-identity infrastructure (the same LY-DNID pilots tied to the AI strategy) are prerequisites for further fintech innovation rather than optional add-ons. On the resilience side, the central bank has also been developing a National Stand-In Processing Service, intended to keep electronic payment services running even during communications or banking-system disruptions — a design consideration shaped directly by Libya's recent history of infrastructure and institutional instability.
Enterprise Demand: Oil, Government Cloud, and SME Commerce
Beyond consumer connectivity and retail fintech, market analysis points to a distinct enterprise growth track for Libya's technology sector. Oil-field Internet-of-Things deployments — instrumentation and remote monitoring across Libya's hydrocarbon infrastructure, still the backbone of the national economy — are cited alongside government cloud-migration projects and small-and-medium-enterprise digital commerce as the three demand drivers expected to lift enterprise technology revenue at a projected compound annual growth rate of 9.22% through 2030. That trajectory suggests Libya's technology story over the back half of this decade will increasingly be written not just in consumer app downloads or e-wallet sign-ups, but in the digitisation of the oil-and-gas sector that still funds the great majority of state revenue, and in the government's own migration toward cloud-hosted, AI-enabled public services envisioned under the 2026-2030 AI strategy.
What Stands in the Way
None of this progress erases the structural challenges specific to Libya's context. The country's political institutions remain divided, and past initiatives — including earlier telecom liberalisation efforts — have been slowed or reversed by shifts in political control over key agencies such as LPTIC and the General Information Authority. Analysts covering Libya's digital-infrastructure push have flagged connectivity and security as intertwined concerns, given that critical fibre routes and data infrastructure can become contested assets in a still-fragile governance environment. The Medusa cable's full commercial benefit, the AI strategy's 2030 targets, and the central bank's financial-inclusion push will all depend on a degree of institutional continuity that Libya has not always been able to guarantee over the past fifteen years. What is nonetheless notable about the 2025-26 period is the sheer coordination on display — a state telecom company landing a major international cable, a central bank simultaneously modernising payment rails and expanding access, and a national AI strategy setting targets that assume both will succeed. For a country whose digital-policy story has for years been defined by disruption, 2026 is shaping up as the year Libya's institutions tried, in parallel, to build rather than merely repair.
