Banco de Fomento says that the 100,000 chips for the AI gigafactory in Sines are “guaranteed”

On Thursday, the CEO of Banco de Fomento assured that he had “a very strong consortium” of “national and international private partners” to try to attract to Sines one of the artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories that the European Commission intends to co-finance under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme. Gonçalo Regalado also said that the 100,000 graphics processors needed for this venture, which will require an investment of around four billion euros, are guaranteed.

“We are finalising the application. I can tell you that we have the will and we have the agreement and the world’s biggest players on board the application, and the 100,000 GPUs [graphics cards] are guaranteed so that the factory can be built in Sines”, said the institution’s CEO during a speech at the Fusion conference, organised by Devoteam in Lisbon, refusing to reveal the identity of the companies involved in the project at this stage. “Our ambition is for this to be the first of several investments”, he stressed.

In June, Banco de Fomento submitted an application to the European Commission to participate in the official tender, which is yet to be launched, during the fourth quarter. That month, ECO had access to a preliminary version that predicted that this large data centre dedicated to training AI models would have a total of 100,000 NVidia 100 model cards, occupying a total area of 28,000 square metres and creating 274 direct jobs.

To finance the €4 billion needed, the plan envisaged €600 million of private capital, to which would be added a €1 billion syndicated loan taken out by the consortium to finance the gigafactory. The Portuguese state would contribute a further €1 billion from European programmes such as Portugal 2030, and the European Commission would then have to provide the remaining €1.4 billion through specific funds for the construction of gigafactories.

Spain is competing against Spain. “We are fighting for ourselves”

“We are fortunate to be one of only 12 countries in Europe that has a single application, which has three main pillars”, Gonçalo Regalado also said.

First, “it has the institutional support of the government and civil society — so there is significant support from the country in this regard”, he said. “Second, it has a very strong consortium of national and international private partners: we have many companies on board and the platform is open. The application is not closed, it is open, and we want to have several customers, several partners and several investors in this factory”, he said.

“Thirdly, Portugal today has conditions that are absolutely unique for it to be one of Europe’s gigafactories, because we have the best submarine cable connection, we have competitively priced energy, we have a cluster and an ecosystem that works on four major pillars: the application is designed with the central pillar of industry, manufacturing and our capacity for innovation; it has a second pillar in the area of health, pharmaceuticals and high-capacity technology; it has a third pillar in the area of defence; and it has a fourth pillar in the area of the ocean economy. Then we have two major enablers, which are telecommunications and energy”, he explained.

The head of Banco de Fomento also said that Portugal is not competing “against anyone” in this race: “We are fighting for ourselves.” But he did not hesitate to mention the neighbouring country, seen in some circles as Portugal’s competitor in this European plan: “While in Spain there are four applications, which are completely in competition with each other, we have taken the decision to make one application and bring everyone on board”, he stressed.