Nvidia chip imports lift Portugal investment and GDP

Portugal’s economy grew 2.3% year on year in the first quarter, with investment providing the strongest support to GDP as external demand weakened. Statistics office INE said gross fixed capital formation in “other machinery and equipment” rose 27.4% from a year earlier, accelerating from 6.1% in the previous quarter, largely reflecting higher imports of “automatic data-processing machines”. That category climbed to about €3.6 billion.

According to two people familiar with the matter, those machines were Nvidia Blackwell processors being installed in the first Start Campus building in Sines. The equipment was physically delivered between January and April, meaning the shipments covered the whole first quarter. The processors are part of an order announced last October by Britain’s Nscale for 12,600 units to serve Microsoft.

The same imports also pushed up Portugal’s imports, which rose 5.2% after a 0.9% increase in the previous quarter, worsening the trade balance. Start Campus had previously described the Blackwell deployment as the first and largest installation of the new processors in the European Union.

More equipment is due to arrive. On May 5, Nscale announced a new order for 66,000 more advanced Nvidia Vera Rubin chips for the second Start Campus building now under construction in Sines, in a project the company said was worth around €700 million. Like the Blackwell processors, they are intended to support Microsoft’s AI computing workloads in Portugal.

Originally published at Eco.pt