Portugal's flagship AI infrastructure project has hit a capacity milestone. SIN01, the first building at Start Campus' 1.2 GW Sines Data Campus, is now full at 37.5 MW, chief marketing officer Omer Wilson told trade publication Capacity in an interview published on 3 August — and the second, far larger building is already under construction to catch the overflow. For corridor readers, the detail that matters sits in the tenant list: the anchor customer for both buildings is Nscale, the AI infrastructure company in which Norway's Aker ASA is one of the largest shareholders.
SIN02, the second of up to six planned facilities on the fully permitted site roughly 150 kilometres south of Lisbon, is designed to deliver 180–240 MW of IT capacity at rack densities of up to 700 kW — hyperscale AI territory. Construction has commenced and is expected to complete by the end of 2027, with the first suite — 200 MW — handed to Nscale at the end of next year, per Wilson. The building is slated to host 66,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips, the generation beyond the 12,600 Blackwell Ultra GB300 units Nscale is deploying in SIN01 for Microsoft — the first such deployment in the European Union.
The Norwegian money behind the tenant
Nscale is headquartered in London, but its capital table runs through Oslo. Aker ASA committed USD 285 million to Nscale's record USD 1.1 billion Series B in September 2025 — the largest Series B in European history — taking a 9.3 percent stake that can rise to 12.2 percent through earn-outs, alongside a 50/50 joint venture with Nscale in Narvik whose first customers are OpenAI and Microsoft. As NorthSouth HQ has mapped previously, that makes the Sines build-out one of the clearest cases of Norwegian industrial capital deployed into Portuguese infrastructure — and it puts Sines and Narvik inside the same corporate strategy.
Wilson's framing of the market makes the corridor logic explicit. Southern Europe, he told Capacity, is becoming “the alternative, alongside Scandinavia, for Europe, as Tier I locations like London, Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam get more squeezed.” The Nordics and Iberia are no longer competing categories so much as the two poles of the same map: cheap renewable power, available land, and grid headroom that the traditional hubs have run out of.
An EDP pact to add power, not drain it
The most consequential new disclosure is on energy. Start Campus has signed a memorandum of understanding with EDP to jointly develop additional renewable capacity in Portugal, working with the utility — and, through it, with the Portuguese government — on supply for the Sines campus. “We want to get to a stage where we're using additional renewable capacity in Portugal, rather than drawing from the country's existing renewable supply,” Wilson said. “This will allow us to make sure our campus doesn't have a local or national impact on energy prices.”
That is a direct answer to the political risk building around European data centres. As AI campuses multiply, public resistance has focused on electricity prices and water — and Sines is engineered to blunt both criticisms: the campus targets a power usage effectiveness of 1.1 and a water usage effectiveness of zero, using Atlantic seawater cooling infrastructure inherited from the decommissioned coal plant that previously occupied the site. The seawater system will be built out in full at SIN02, with conventional cooling bridging some workloads in the meantime.
From build of faith to financed platform
Wilson was candid about how much the project's risk profile has changed. SIN01 “was built speculatively, so when our investors acquired the land and started construction, there was no lease — it was a bit of a build of faith,” he said. SIN02, by contrast, sits inside what he called a huge financing structure unique in Europe, anchored by Nscale as direct customer and build partner, with Microsoft supporting the project at the back end and NVIDIA inside the infrastructure provision. Microsoft, Wilson noted, plans to provision Copilot to EU enterprises from the campus — a concrete signal of what Sines will actually serve.
External validation has followed: SIN01 was named Best Data Centre in Europe at the Datacloud Awards in June 2026. NorthSouth HQ covered the financial architecture of the expansion — €695 million split between shared site infrastructure and the new building — when it was announced in May; the August interview confirms the money is now turning into concrete, pipework and delivery dates.
Why this matters for the corridor
The Nordic-Iberian AI axis is consolidating. A Norwegian-backed operator is now the full tenant of Portugal's largest private infrastructure build, chips two generations ahead are reserved against a 2027 delivery date, and Portugal's biggest utility is being pulled into the project's power planning. For Nordic data-centre developers, Sines is confirmation that hyperscale workloads once assumed to default to Norway and Sweden now have a southern option with warmer politics and colder water. For Portuguese suppliers — from electrical contractors to the Viana do Castelo power-module factory feeding Nordic data-centre builds — the order book just gained another 200 MW of visibility. Watch for the SIN02 delivery milestones through 2027, and for whether the EDP MoU hardens into contracted new-build capacity.