Megacentre in Sines brings investment of 30 billion euros to Portugal by 2030
The five-year forecast was given this Friday by Start Campus and the US embassy at the inauguration of the first building of the data centre and involves new customer projects as well as construction.
The CEO of Start Campus said this Friday that the data centre in Sines will bring an investment of another 30 billion euros to Portugal over the next five years. The figure includes an additional amount to what the company has allocated for construction and concerns new investments by current and future customers when they install their servers.
“It could reach 30 billion, including what customers will invest. It’s all an estimate”, Robert Dunn told journalists on the sidelines of the inauguration ceremony for the first data centre building on the Alentejo coast, in Sines.
Start Campus inaugurated this Friday the space that kicks off the data centre campus in Sines with a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW), which the company informally calls the “model floor” because it is the smallest of the 8.5 billion euro investment.
This first campus building is prepared for cloud technologies, Artificial Intelligence A and HPC – High-Performance Computing. High-performance computing (HPC) data centres are designed to house a significant number of servers and supercomputers to process massive amounts of data.
The project’s first building (SIN01) has been operational since October and, during the construction phase, created approximately 700 jobs through its supply chain. Start Campus currently employs around six dozen people directly.
“It’s an investment deeply committed to sustainability, which will bring more qualified jobs, diversifying economic activity in the region and contributing to building a long-term digital ecosystem. It joins other major investments that have demonstrated that Portugal is a country with a good value proposition for investors,” said Economy Minister Pedro Reis.
The US embassy in Portugal was also present at the inauguration ceremony, due to the US capital involved, which represents “one of the largest foreign investments in Portugal’s history”.
“This is a paradigm shift and we are proud to support this initiative, which will improve Portugal’s global connectivity, deepen bilateral ties and create thousands of jobs in Portugal and the United States”, said diplomat Douglas A. Koneff, chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Lisbon.
Construction of the second data centre building in Sines will begin by the end of the second quarter, an official company source told ECO. The second phase of the more than eight billion euro, 1.2 gigawatt (GW) capacity project, which has been under licence since last year, will start by June.
