“We’re about to start”. Chips for Microsoft’s “supercomputer” arrive in Sines in January

“We are about to begin. The first chips will arrive in January, and we will be at Sines 01”, said Andres Ortolá, managing director of Microsoft Portugal. At a meeting with journalists on Wednesday, the manager gave a general overview of the investment schedule of more than $10 billion to bring 12,600 state-of-the-art Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GB30 graphics cards to Sines, which will be installed in the Start Campus data centre.

“We will start work on opening and building Sines 02, and then the rest of the GPUs [graphics processing units] will arrive”, he said. “The entire project will run from now until 2032, but it will be at full capacity in 2028 or 2029”.

Ortolá stressed that it will be “the largest supercomputer in Europe”. And what will this machine be used for? “We will serve our European customers”, he replied. “Many of the queries from Copilot [Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant] will be directed to Portugal, and we will respond”.

Asked how the investment of more than $10 billion in Sines will be distributed, Ortolá said he does not have all the details, but explained that the costs include GPUs, “which are expensive devices, all maintenance, cooling and energy systems”.

Enthusiastically, he emphasised that “there is one thing that is extremely important”, which led to the choice of Portugal as the destination for the investment. “It is because it is sustainable, it is 100% green energy, 100% sustainable”.

“Microsoft has a good discipline for doing projects that make sense, but also make sense from an ecological footprint point of view”, he revealed. “We know that the power footprint is different, obviously it’s bigger and that’s why quantum computing will also help, but in the meantime we’re doing this, we’re very aware that it has to be sustainable and Sines will be sustainable.”

“That’s the problem”

The Argentine, who joined Microsoft in 2020 and has headed the US technology company’s Portuguese subsidiary since 2022, began his conversation with journalists with a historical example that he linked to the present day. When the German Johannes Gutenberg created the modern printing press in the 15th century, it was not Germany that took best advantage of the innovation, but the Netherlands, which began to publish Bibles, maps and scientific works en masse.

Similarly, Ortolá explained, data shows that, at present, the creation of infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) is being led by the US and China (with Europe a distant third), but at the same time, usage rates put the United Arab Emirates, Norway and Singapore at the forefront.

“These are three countries with configurations similar to Portugal’s, with populations of between five and 10 million”. But are they richer? “Yes, I lived in Singapore for five years and I can assure you that there is no secret sauce, they are not smarter and the talent here in Portugal is the same”, he stressed, admitting, however, that these countries may have more advantageous tax systems.

However, Portugal’s main delay lies in its lack of agility. “In my opinion, it’s the ability to make decisions and get things done”, he said, citing as an example an AI chatbot that Microsoft created for the justice system, related to divorces, the first in Europe and possibly the world.

“The first one is still there, but in exactly the same state as when we made it, while other countries already have hundreds of systems in production. That’s the problem, right there.”

No loss of autonomy

The technology company carried out a major reorganisation of its operational structure in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) in July this year, with Microsoft Portugal ceasing to operate as an autonomous entity and becoming part of a large cluster called ‘South MCC’ in Southern Europe, which also includes countries such as Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Albania, Bosnia, Slovenia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Croatia and Bulgaria. Andres Ortolá rejects the idea that the process represents a loss of autonomy for the unit in Portugal.

“It was an interpretation that, in my opinion, was wrong”, he said. “I celebrated 20 years at Microsoft two or three weeks ago, and organisations change, Microsoft changes, and I’ve seen six or seven of these.”

“Before, we had Western Europe and Eastern Europe, now we have Northern Europe and Southern Europe. It’s exactly the same, we are in the context of Southern Europe, with a similar structure, except that we report to other teams, there is nothing else, there is no loss of autonomy”, he stressed, also pointing out cultural gains from working with more comparable economies, such as Greece.

Asked whether this reorganisation could involve redundancies, Ortolá replied clearly: “Every year, at the end, when we do the maths, we have more and more employees”, revealing that when he arrived in Portugal in 2022, Microsoft had between 1,500 and 1,600 employees and now has 2,000.