Microsoft Plans To Invest $10 Bln In Sines AI Data Hub In Portugal: Reports

(RTTNews) - Tech major Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) plans to invest around $10 billion in an artificial intelligence data centre in Sines, a port city in Portugal, over the next few years, reports said.

In the project, one of the company's largest AI investment projects in Europe, the firm will work in partnership with developers Start Campus, a joint venture between U.S. investment fund Davidson Kempner and UK's Pioneer Point Partners, as well as AI infrastructure platform Nscale and AI chipmaker Corp. (NVDA). The company will deploy 12,600 next-generation NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units or GPUs in the data centre.

Reuters quoted Microsoft's Vice Chair and President Brad Smith as saying, "By strengthening the national AI infrastructure through collaboration with Nscale, NVIDIA, and Start Campus, we are helping to position Portugal as a benchmark for the responsible and scalable development of AI in Europe."

The latest investment reportedly is bigger than all the investments in data centres that the company has ever made in Spain.

Start Campus is developing the SINES DC project, a 1.2-gigawatt data center campus in Portugal. Earlier in April, the company opened SIN01, a 26MW data center facility, its first operational facility within the SINES Data Campus. The company also announced then its plan to invest more than 8.5 billion euros in construction investment in the data centre hub to serve growing demand from major tech and AI companies.

Start Campus, in partnership with Nscale, in mid-October had announced deployments of NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platform at its SIN01 data centre in Sines, supporting Microsoft in delivering advanced AI capabilities across the European Union.

In pre-market activity, MSFT shares were losing around 0.36 percent to trade at $504.16.