Start Campus Sines Data Campus data center, Sines, Setúbal

Start Campus's data center campus at Sines, in Portugal, has one building running and a second going up: SIN01 is in operation, and Radio M24 reported that construction of SIN02 would begin early in 2026 and run about 24 months, to the first quarter of 2028. The plan is six data processing buildings, and the government has classed the project, SINES 4.0, as a Project of Potential National Interest.

The first building went up over ground the state's nature agency had asked to be protected. Inspecting the site from November 13 to 17, 2023, the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests found SIN01 had been built directly over a temporary pond it should have kept intact, that one of two ponds set aside as compensation had been partly filled in, and that the other had been invaded by exotic species.

Start Campus said protected heathers had been moved to a nursery with 200 tonnes of soil, to be put back later. The felling of 1,800 cork oaks was approved at the EDP Renováveis Morgavel wind farm that is to supply the campus, and at full build the campus would consume about a fifth of the renewable electricity Portugal generated in 2022.

The project also helped bring down a government. In November 2023 Prime Minister António Costa resigned over Operation Influencer, a corruption investigation that took in a green hydrogen plant, lithium mines and this campus. Two Start Campus executives, Afonso Salema and Rui Oliveira Neves, resigned while under investigation; the charges were later dropped. Start Campus says the whole campus runs on renewable electricity and cools with seawater, and that the 8.5 billion euro investment is its own, with no public subsidy.

The second building has one tenant lined up: on May 5, 2026 Nscale announced it would take the 200 megawatt building, investing 465 million euros there and 230 million euros in shared infrastructure, to install more than 66,000 Nvidia Rubin GPUs for Microsoft from late 2027, on top of the 12,600 Blackwell Ultra GPUs it is deploying for Microsoft in SIN01.

Start Campus has secured 1.2 gigawatts of grid capacity from REN, the national transmission operator, and Data Center Frontier reported in 2024 that all the buildings were expected to be in operation by 2030. Construction of the second building has begun, the Portugal Resident reported in May 2026 citing Expresso, which put the plan at six buildings by 2031 and noted that the prosecutors' investigation has not interrupted the development.