The data center activity in Setúbal district centers on Sines, a coastal industrial town about 90 km from Lisbon. There Start Campus is developing the SINES Data Campus, which it says will eventually have six buildings and about 1.2 GW of IT capacity. Only the first building, SIN01, is operating. DCD reported that it launched in January 2025. Start Campus's chief operating officer, Luis Rodrigues, told New Project Media that SIN01 delivers 31 MW and is fully leased, and that the second building, SIN02, will add 180 to 200 MW. The company puts the total projected investment at about EUR 8.5 billion. The campus is designed to cool with seawater rather than freshwater.
The project was at the center of Operation Influencer, the corruption investigation that led Prime Minister António Costa to resign in November 2023. DCD reported that the probe covered a hydrogen plant, several lithium mines and the Start Campus site, and that Start Campus executives were arrested and its premises searched. DCD later reported that charges against former CEO Afonso Salema had been dropped.
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The same month, Portugal's Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) found after a November 13 to 17, 2023 inspection that the first building had been built on top of a temporary Mediterranean pond. Protecting that pond was a condition of exempting the first phase, known as NEST, from a full environmental impact assessment. According to the ICNF statement published by Portugal Resident, one of two sites set aside for relocating protected heather had been partially landfilled, and the second had been invaded by exotic species. The institute referred its findings to the Alentejo regional coordination commission, which decides on administrative penalties. Biologist Rita Alcazar of the League for the Protection of Nature said, "the data centre has already been built on top of one of the temporary ponds." Francisco Ferreira of the environmental group ZERO criticized the exemption, arguing that with construction already under way there would be no room for a negative opinion when the later phases came up for assessment. Those phases lie inside the Southwest Coast Special Area of Conservation. Start Campus told DCD that the heather had been moved to a nursery and would be replanted, and that no construction had begun on the later phases.
The campus has since drawn major AI tenants. In October 2025, Microsoft, the AI cloud company Nscale and Start Campus announced a partnership under which Nscale would deploy up to 12,600 Nvidia GB300 chips for Microsoft in Sines. In November 2025, Microsoft president Brad Smith said the company planned to invest $10 billion in AI data centers there. New Project Media reported that Portugal's grid bottleneck is delaying developers, Start Campus among them, though Rodrigues said he welcomed it as a sign of healthy competition.
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Setúbal1
| Project | Company | Status | Power | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start Campus Sines Data CampusSines | Start Campus | 31 MW |
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