Data centers in Portugal: 2 projects mapped

Portugal's data center story is Sines, on the Alentejo coast, where Start Campus is building a campus of six buildings and about 1.2 gigawatts on land left by a closed coal power station, cooled with seawater. Only the first building, SIN01, has been running, since January 2025; the second, SIN02, is under development at 180 MW. Microsoft said at the Web Summit in Lisbon that it would invest $10 billion in AI data centers there with Start Campus and Nscale, which is deploying Nvidia GB300s for Microsoft at the site.

The project brought down a government. Start Campus was one of the subjects of Operation Influencer, the corruption investigation that led Prime Minister António Costa to resign in November 2023. Wiretaps contained repeated references to efforts to get around the environmental protection of the site; the former energy secretary João Galamba was recorded suggesting that the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) should redraw the boundaries of the protected area. The ICNF later confirmed after an inspection that the first building had been built on top of a temporary Mediterranean pond, a priority habitat protected under Portuguese and European law, and referred the breaches to the regional authorities. "The Portuguese State has a legal obligation to protect these habitats," biologist Rita Alcazar of the League for the Protection of Nature said.

On March 19, 2026 the government presented a National Data Center Plan to simplify licensing, with AICEP as the single point of contact and pre-serviced zones for data centers. The industry welcomed it but doubted delivery. "If a process takes two years, let it take two years. What matters is knowing how long it takes," said Start Campus's operations chief, Luís Rodrigues. In September, Environment and Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said energy-intensive industries "come ahead of data centres in our priorities" for grid connections, and that data centers would have to bid at auction and show they will not strain public water supplies. Data center requests had made up the largest share of 40 GW of grid connection applications last year; firm applications fell to about 4 GW once deposits were required.

Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.