Start Campus in Sines to add 66,000 AI chips for Microsoft
Portugal’s Start Campus will receive more than 66,000 Nvidia AI chips from Nscale from late 2027, expanding computing capacity in a project tied to Microsoft.
Britain’s Nscale will install more than 66,000 Nvidia Rubin AI chips at Start Campus’s data centre in Sines from late 2027, in a project that will provide additional computing capacity for Microsoft and adds to Portugal’s push to attract large-scale AI infrastructure.
The new deployment comes on top of roughly 12,600 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra chips that Nscale is already installing in the first Start Campus building, as announced last October. In both cases, the computing capacity will be used by Microsoft to serve its customers.
Nscale said the expansion includes an additional €230 million investment in shared infrastructure and €465 million in a second 200 MW building at the Sines Data Campus. Start Campus chief executive Robert Dunn said the project will be “one of Europe’s largest NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 deployments”.
Nvidia unveiled the Vera Rubin line in January as its latest generation of AI chips, designed for building and running autonomous AI agents. According to the company, the processors are more energy efficient and have lower computing costs than the Blackwell range.
The announcement comes as demand for AI processing capacity continues to outpace new supply. The Portuguese project is also linked to Microsoft’s broader commitment to invest “more than $10 billion” in Portugal through the Start Campus data centre via Nscale, a plan the US group said in November 2025 would support advanced AI workloads across multiple sectors.
Originally published at Eco.pt