Invest Cyprus brings the companies in, CITEA wants them to buy local: the two sign an MoU

The Cyprus Information Technology Enterprises Association (CITEA) and Invest Cyprus signed a memorandum of understanding on 29 September 2026, establishing a framework for institutional cooperation and joint initiatives on artificial intelligence, investment and international outreach.

The one concrete commitment is worth more than the framework language. The stated priority is to connect foreign companies choosing Cyprus with technology businesses already operating on the island — using the expertise and solutions available in the local market. In plain terms: when a company relocates here, CITEA wants its members to be the suppliers rather than watching the new arrival import its entire stack.

CITEA president George Malekkos framed it as an opening-up exercise: "from the very first day we assumed office as the new Board of Directors, one of our key objectives was to open CITEA up to the outside world," adding that the association's role is to "build these bridges and help our members develop new relationships."

Invest Cyprus CEO Marios Tannousis put the investment side of it: "Through this memorandum, we are building exactly this bridge, connecting international capital with Cypriot innovation and positioning Cyprus dynamically on the global digital map of Artificial Intelligence."

The AI half. Malekkos also presented CITEA's position on what a national AI strategy should contain, stressing that it must be tied to specific actions, investment, implementation mechanisms and measurable outcomes for the economy and businesses. That is the same line CITEA has been running all month — it took its National AI Strategy recommendations to employers' federation Oev in mid-September — and the repetition is the point: the association is lobbying against a strategy document that lands without a budget or a delivery mechanism attached.

What to be sceptical about. An MoU between a business association and a national investment promotion agency is, by construction, an agreement to cooperate rather than a programme. There is no published budget, no target number of introductions, no timeline and no named first initiative. The measurable outcomes Malekkos demands of the government's AI strategy are conspicuously absent from his own agreement.

Why it matters anyway. The gap this targets is real and rarely discussed. Cyprus has spent several years successfully attracting relocating tech and fintech firms into Limassol and Nicosia office space, and the standard criticism is that those arrivals form a parallel economy — foreign headcount, foreign suppliers, foreign tooling — sitting alongside the local IT sector rather than trading with it. Procurement is the mechanism that would actually knit the two together, and it is the thing neither Invest Cyprus' relocation pitch nor the start-up grant pipeline has ever addressed. The test is not whether the MoU gets signed; it is whether a single relocated multinational names a CITEA member as a vendor in the next twelve months.

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