Nscale adds €695 million to its AI data centre in Sines

British company Nscale announced in early May an expansion of its agreement with Microsoft and Start Campus that will bring more than 66,000 Nvidia Rubin graphics cards to the data centre in Sines, on Portugal's Alentejo coast. The additional investment, valued at €695 million — €230 million in shared infrastructure and €465 million in a second 200-megawatt building — comes on top of roughly 12,600 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra processors that Nscale is already installing in the complex's first building, under an agreement announced last October.

Portugal as a gateway for European AI

According to Nscale, this is one of the most significant AI infrastructure projects in the European Union and one of the largest ever carried out in Portugal. Josh Payne, the company's CEO and founder, called it one of the most significant AI investments made in the European bloc to date. The Sines data centre, operated by Start Campus, is permitted for a total capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, which the company describes as a clear runway to meet rising demand for AI processing capacity — driven by chatbots such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude — at a time when infrastructure supply in Europe is growing more slowly than demand.

The Microsoft link and the global race for compute

Both the Blackwell Ultra processors and the future Nvidia Rubin chips, whose installation in Sines is expected to begin in late 2027, serve Microsoft workloads. Microsoft has committed to investing more than $10 billion in the Portuguese data centre through Nscale — a commitment made by company president Brad Smith in November 2025, as part of Microsoft's Digital Commitment to Europe, which envisions doubling its data centre capacity across 16 European countries by 2027. Nvidia's Vera Rubin line, unveiled in January, was designed specifically to run autonomous AI agents and promises better energy efficiency and lower compute costs than the Blackwell generation.

• Nscale's additional investment: €695 million (€230 million infrastructure, €465 million new building)
• New processors: more than 66,000 Nvidia Rubin GPUs, from late 2027
• Already installed: roughly 12,600 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra processors
• Permitted capacity of the Sines data centre: 1.2 gigawatts
• Microsoft's commitment in Sines: more than $10 billion

Factors such as abundant, competitively priced renewable energy and the availability of English-fluent talent make Portugal an attractive destination for this kind of investment, at a time when Europe's more mature markets face energy constraints limiting the expansion of new data centres. Daniel Boehm, a partner at Davidson Kempner — one of Start Campus's anchor shareholders — said the fresh financial commitment consolidates Portugal's position as an emerging AI leader in Europe.

The Sines site itself has a symbolic backstory: the land was previously home to a coal-fired power plant that was decommissioned before being redeveloped into the data campus, turning a stranded fossil-fuel asset into one of Europe's largest AI compute hubs. Location also played a role in the choice: Sines is already a landing point for several transatlantic subsea cables connecting Europe to Africa and the Americas, and its deep-water port gives the site logistical access that few other European locations can match for building out gigawatt-scale campuses.

For businesses more broadly, the immediate takeaway from Sines is not direct access to this compute capacity — reserved, for now, for Microsoft's global customers — but what it signals about the scale of the race for AI infrastructure: more than $10 billion committed by a single cloud provider to a single site shows how much capital is now required to compete for frontier compute. For companies in the data centre supply chain — cooling, power infrastructure, construction — a hub like Sines represents a growing European customer base, and for enterprises evaluating cloud strategy, it is a reminder that AI capacity availability, not just price, is becoming a competitive factor in its own right.