We are about to begin. The first chips will arrive in January, and we will be at Sines 01”, said Andres Ortolá, managing director of Microsoft Portugal. At a meeting with journalists on Wednesday, the manager gave a general overview of the investment schedule of more than $10 billion to bring 12,600 state-of-the-art Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GB30 graphics cards to Sines, which will be installed in the Start Campus data centre.
“We will start work on opening and building Sines 02, and then the rest of the GPUs [graphics processing units] will arrive”, he said. “The entire project will run from now until 2032, but it will be at full capacity in 2028 or 2029”.
Ortolá stressed that it will be “the largest supercomputer in Europe”. And what will this machine be used for? “We will serve our European customers”, he replied. “Many of the queries from Copilot [Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant] will be directed to Portugal, and we will respond”.
Asked how the investment of more than $10 billion in Sines will be distributed, Ortolá said he does not have all the details, but explained that the costs include GPUs, “which are expensive devices, all maintenance, cooling and energy systems”.
Enthusiastically, he emphasised that “there is one thing that is extremely important”, which led to the choice of Portugal as the destination for the investment. “It is because it is sustainable, it is 100% green energy, 100% sustainable”.
“Microsoft has a good discipline for doing projects that make sense, but also make sense from an ecological footprint point of view”, he revealed. “We know that the power footprint is different, obviously it’s bigger and that’s why quantum computing will also help, but in the meantime we’re doing this, we’re very aware that it has to be sustainable and Sines will be sustainable.”
