Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure at a data center in Portugal’s port city of Sines over the next five years, marking one of the largest AI investment projects in Europe, it said on Tuesday.
The technology giant will work in cooperation with developers Start Campus, AI infrastructure platform Nscale, and chipmaker NVIDIA to deploy 12,600 next-generation NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in Sines, 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of Lisbon.
Start Campus, a venture between U.S. investment fund Davidson Kempner and Britain’s Pioneer Point Partners, in April unveiled a plan to invest 8.5 billion euros ($9.9 billion) by 2030 in a data center hub to satisfy growing demand from major tech and AI companies.
One of the intended six buildings is already in service.
“By strengthening the national AI infrastructure through collaboration with Nscale, NVIDIA, and Start Campus, we are helping to position Portugal as a benchmark for the responsible and scalable development of AI in Europe,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, said.
Portugal has big investment projects set up for Sines to provide green energy to power energy-intensive data centers.
Portugal’s Atlantic coastline makes it a key location for undersea cables connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas, forming the backbone of the World Wide Web.
Investments in data centers, which assist in offering computing capacity for AI, have grown since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, as firms across sectors progressively migrate their operations to the cloud and integrate AI into their businesses.
