Lisbob, Nov. 11, 2025 (Lusa) - Microsoft is going to invest $10 billion (around €8.6 billion) in the Sines data centre, the technology company's president, Brad Smith, who is in Portugal for the Web Summit, told Negócios.
"We're investing $10 billion in Portugal, in Sines, with Start Campus and Nscale", said Brad Smith, in an interview with the newspaper Negócios, published on Tuesday, explaining that this investment “is bigger than all the investments in data centres that the company has ever made in Spain”.
The president of the US company said that the technology company is stepping up its commitment to Portugal, with investments that are making the country a front-runner in the installation of artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories.
"We're building in Europe. Interestingly, one of the biggest investments we're making this year in Europe is actually in Portugal," emphasised Brad Smith.
In October, Microsoft and Nscale announced that they would be the first tenants of the Start Campus building in Sines, planning to install 12,600 state-of-the-art Nvidia processors in the Sines Data Centre.
The head of Microsoft explained that the companies have already been exploring this partnership in order to ‘work towards bringing a large number of CPUs [computing nodes and central processing units] to Portugal, the most advanced in the world’.
"There's a way of thinking about what we're doing in Portugal. Countries across Europe are competing for public funding in the European Union to build a gigafactory, and the competition is intense. Portugal has already won the bid with Microsoft, because we've decided that we're going to build this AI gigafactory in Sines," explained Brad Smith.
The president of the US technology company emphasises the potential of the Sines location, highlighting the advantage of submarine cables as a way ‘for North America to be closer to Europe’.
Microsoft's leader acknowledged that the investment in Portugal reflects ‘a lot of work, from the energy policy followed in Portugal, where energy is cheaper and there is a good climate’, also highlighting the country's broadband connectivity.
These conditions make Portugal "a very important and attractive country in Europe for building this type of data centre and this type of investment. This is good news for Portugal, which is in a very good position to compete, not only because of what it has been winning over time, but also for future investments," said Brad Smith.
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