Microsoft invests billions in Portuguese AI data center

90 kilometers south of Lisbon, a campus for AI computing facilities is being built. Microsoft is making a major investment.

(Image: Denis Linine/Shutterstock.com)

Nov 12, 2025 at 8:52 am CET

2 min. read

iX Magazin

By

Daniel AJ Sokolov

In the search for computing power for artificial intelligence and the cloud, Microsoft has found what it was looking for in Portugal. In the port city of Sines, about 90 kilometers as the crow flies south of the capital Lisbon, a campus is being built that is intended to draw 1.2 gigawatts of power. One of a total of six planned facilities is already in place. Now Microsoft is promising to contribute ten billion US dollars, around 8.6 billion euros.

This is what Microsoft's President Brad Smith told the Portuguese daily newspaper Jornal de Negócios told the Portuguese daily newspaper on the occasion of the Web Summit taking place in Lisbon. It is unclear how much of the money is rent or usage fees and how much capital is flowing into shares or other forms of investment. The timeframe for the cash flow is also not yet known. No less than 12,600 next-generation high-end GPUs from Nvidia are expected to compute in Sines one day.

Microsoft's partners are the British hyperscaler Nscale and the Portuguese company Start Campus. The latter is dedicated to the construction and operation of data centers on an AI scale. The facilities in Sines are to be operated exclusively with electricity from renewable energy sources. The sea is heated for cooling the enormous facilities. Start Campus also remains tight-lipped about details. It welcomes Microsoft's announcement and notes that it concerns both the existing campus section and the planned expansions.

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In addition to access to seawater, the Sines location has other strategic advantages: an undersea cable leads from there to Brazil and soon to French Guiana; probably more influential is that Google will open a fiber optic connection called Nuvem to the US East Coast next year. Meanwhile, the Portuguese government is planning to expand Sines into an important NATO location. It is already the largest artificial harbor in the Atlantic country.