Microsoft announced more than $10 billion for AI infrastructure at the SINES Data Campus in Sines, Portugal, beginning in 2026. This is not simply a new Microsoft-owned Azure building. The project is a partner-delivered buildout: Start Campus provides and operates the data-center campus, Nscale delivers and operates the GPU infrastructure, and NVIDIA supplies the accelerators.
The initial plan covered about 12,600 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GB300 GPUs. A May 2026 expansion added plans for more than 66,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs from late 2027, plus a second 200-megawatt building. Those figures describe announced and scheduled capacity, not hardware independently confirmed as operational.
What Microsoft announced
On November 11, 2025, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith announced an investment of more than $10 billion in Portugal’s AI infrastructure. The site is the SINES Data Campus in Sines, roughly 150 kilometers south of Lisbon. Microsoft said the investment would begin in 2026 and support advanced AI resources for European customers.
The announcement followed an October 2025 agreement in which Nscale said it would deliver approximately 12,600 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs at Sines from the first quarter of 2026. Microsoft’s announcement is available from Microsoft Portugal; the GPU agreement is described by Nscale.
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It is not a single $10 billion Microsoft-owned data center
Public descriptions place the infrastructure inside Start Campus’s SINES Data Campus. Start Campus is developing and operating the campus, while Nscale is responsible for the AI infrastructure layer. NVIDIA provides the GPU platforms. The available announcements do not establish that Microsoft is independently constructing or owning a $10 billion campus.
The $10 billion headline also has an important accounting limitation: the companies have not published a detailed breakdown showing how much is Microsoft capital expenditure, GPU and equipment procurement, contracted capacity, or payments over the life of the arrangement. It should therefore be described as a more-than-$10-billion AI-infrastructure commitment, not as a one-time construction cheque.
Each company’s role
- Microsoft: The principal customer and financial backer identified in the announcements. The capacity is intended for Microsoft’s AI products and European customers, but specific Azure regions, services and workloads have not been disclosed.
- Start Campus: Developer and operator of the physical SINES Data Campus. It describes a total campus investment of €8.5 billion, backed by Davidson Kempner Capital Management and Pioneer Point Partners.
- Nscale: Provider and operator of the GPU clusters, networking and related infrastructure. Its later announcement covers the Rubin expansion.
- NVIDIA: Supplier of the accelerator platforms: Blackwell Ultra GB300 for the first deployment and Vera Rubin systems for the expansion.
The numbers are different projects and phases
| Item | What has been announced | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft commitment | More than $10 billion | AI-infrastructure investment beginning in 2026; public financial breakdown not provided. |
| Start Campus project | €8.5 billion | Start Campus’s broader planned campus investment, not an additional Microsoft total. |
| SINES campus design | 1.2 gigawatts of IT capacity | Planned full-campus scale. |
| SIN01 building | 26 megawatts | First building in the campus. |
| Initial Microsoft-supported deployment | About 12,600 Blackwell Ultra GB300 GPUs | Planned first deployment associated with the 2025 agreement. |
| Later expansion | More than 66,000 Rubin GPUs | Additional GPUs scheduled to begin arriving in late 2027. |
| Second building | 200 megawatts | New building announced with the expansion. |
| Nscale expansion infrastructure | €230 million shared infrastructure and €465 million building investment | Additional figures announced by Nscale on May 5, 2026. |
These amounts use different currencies, scopes and phases. Adding them together would overstate what any one company is spending.
What was already operating before Microsoft’s announcement
Start Campus says SIN01 began operations in the fourth quarter of 2024 and was formally inaugurated on April 4, 2025. It is a 26-megawatt facility and the first building in the planned 1.2-gigawatt campus, according to Start Campus.
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That means Sines was an operating data-center site, rather than an entirely future proposal, when Microsoft announced its commitment in November 2025. The public releases do not independently confirm how many of the 12,600 planned GPUs had been installed and commissioned by August 18, 2026.
What changed in 2026
On May 5, 2026, Nscale announced a much larger second phase for Microsoft at Sines. It covers more than 66,000 additional NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, deliveries beginning in late 2027, €230 million in shared infrastructure and €465 million for a second 200-megawatt building. The announcement says this expansion builds on the first deployment of more than 12,600 Blackwell Ultra GPUs. The timetable is set out in Nscale’s May 2026 release.
The combined figure of roughly 78,600 GPUs is therefore a mixture of an initial announced deployment and a future expansion. It is not a statement that 78,600 GPUs are operating today.
Why Sines was selected
Sines offers several characteristics valued by large AI facilities:
- Connectivity: An Atlantic location with submarine-cable routes linking Europe, North America and Africa.
- Industrial scale: Existing port and industrial infrastructure and room for a large campus.
- Power potential: Portugal’s renewable-generation base and the possibility of expanding grid connections.
- Cooling options: Start Campus says its design targets seawater-assisted cooling and a design PUE of 1.1 without consuming water for cooling.
- European location: Hardware physically located inside the European Union can support customers with EU-residency requirements, subject to the service and contract selected.
The energy and cooling statements are developer design claims, not independent performance results. Nscale similarly markets Sines as a hyperscale AI site using renewable power and ocean-based cooling; those descriptions should be read as the company’s positioning, not a third-party audit. See Start Campus and Nscale’s infrastructure overview.
What “AI data center” means in practice
This infrastructure is designed around dense GPU clusters rather than ordinary CPU-focused cloud servers. Training and inference require high-capacity power delivery, high-speed GPU-to-GPU networking, storage and scheduling software, and liquid or seawater-assisted cooling.
A GPU count alone does not reveal useful computing capacity. Performance also depends on the GPU model, memory and bandwidth, interconnect topology, power available per rack, cooling, software utilization and whether capacity is dedicated, reserved or shared.
What European customers could gain
The project could add EU-based capacity for model training and inference, improve latency for some European workloads and give regulated organizations another location for processing data. Nscale explicitly presents the Sines deployment as a sovereign-AI option for European customers; its description appears in the October 2025 announcement.
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Location alone does not make an AI service fully sovereign. Buyers still need to examine:
- Where data is stored and processed under the chosen service configuration.
- Which company controls operations and support.
- Applicable laws and legal exposure of Microsoft, Nscale and other suppliers.
- Dependence on NVIDIA hardware and software.
- Whether Sines capacity is available to the customer, at what price and under what reservation terms.
Public announcements do not specify customer pricing, guaranteed latency, service-region labels or data-residency terms for this capacity.
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Electricity and grid capacity
AI facilities consume large amounts of electricity continuously. A 2026 Reuters report said more than 2.6 gigawatts of data-center capacity was under development in Portugal, led by Start Campus’s 1.2-gigawatt project. The country’s infrastructure minister also warned that Portugal wanted high-value data centers rather than power-intensive projects with limited economic benefit. The report is available through Reuters via Yahoo Finance.
The benefit is additional computing capacity, construction and infrastructure investment. The risk is that grid expansion, generation and transmission fail to keep pace, or that local electricity and land costs rise without equivalent local value.
Renewable-power claims
“100% renewable” can describe contracted or annually matched electricity rather than every electron consumed being renewable at every hour. Important questions include whether certificates are used, how much new generation is added and what happens during periods of low wind, solar or hydropower output.
Cooling and marine effects
Seawater cooling may reduce freshwater consumption, but it still raises questions about intake systems, discharge temperature, corrosion, maintenance, backup cooling and extreme-weather resilience. “No water for cooling” should not automatically be read as zero water use or zero environmental impact.
Concentration and dependency
The project increases Europe’s capacity while concentrating important layers of the stack among Microsoft, Nscale, Start Campus and NVIDIA. It may broaden access to compute, but it does not make Europe independent of U.S. cloud, chip and software suppliers.
What to watch next
- Confirmation that the initial 12,600-GPU deployment has been installed and commissioned.
- Permitting, construction and commissioning progress for the second 200-megawatt building.
- Rubin GPU deliveries, which Nscale schedules to begin in late 2027.
- Microsoft disclosures identifying the relevant Azure services, regions and customer-access model.
- Independent reporting on grid connections, renewable procurement, cooling impacts and local economic benefits.
The announcements establish investment and capacity plans, but they do not establish permanent-job totals, tax contributions, consumer electricity effects or guaranteed benefits for Portuguese startups and universities.
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