German Data-Centre Supplier Hennig Picks Figueira da Foz for a €53 Million Plant and 450 Jobs
German engineering firm Hennig will invest €53 million in a 35,000 m² factory in Figueira da Foz's Pincho industrial zone, making power components for data centres. It plans about 450 jobs, production from January 2028 and roughly €500 million in annual revenue within five years.
A German family manufacturer is betting that Portugal will become one of Europe's favoured homes for large data centres — and it is putting €53 million behind the wager. Hennig, a Munich-founded engineering company with roughly 75 years of history, plans to build a factory in the Pincho industrial zone of Figueira da Foz to make the energy and infrastructure components that keep the world's server farms running.
The plant will span some 35,000 square metres and create about 450 jobs — around 400 on the shop floor and a further 50 in support roles — once it is up and running. Production is scheduled to begin in January 2028, and the company expects the Portuguese operation to be turning over close to €500 million a year within five years of opening. Between 60% and 70% of what it makes is earmarked for export.
Hennig's speciality is the heavy, tailor-made hardware that sits behind the racks of computers: large containerised units that house the backup generators and power systems data centres rely on to stay online. It is a niche that has boomed alongside the global scramble to build computing capacity for artificial intelligence, and the firm counts some of the industry's biggest names — reportedly including Nvidia and Apple — among the clients it is chasing.
For chief executive Robert Schwaiger, the choice of Portugal was strategic rather than sentimental. He has described the country as a front-runner to host the larger data centres now being planned across Europe, pointing to two advantages that keep coming up in the sector: an abundance of renewable electricity, which both powers the facilities and burnishes their environmental credentials, and an Atlantic seaboard that offers logistical reach for exporting bulky equipment. Figueira da Foz, a port city on the mouth of the Mondego river in the Coimbra district, sits squarely at that intersection of green power and coastal access.
The investment lands at a moment when Portugal is actively courting this kind of capital. The government has been pushing to position the country as a European data-centre hub, and a string of projects — from hyperscale campuses to the components that feed them — have been announced or floated in recent months. Not all have gone smoothly: some proposed sites have run into local resistance over water and land use, a reminder that the promise of jobs does not always silence questions about resources.
Hennig's pitch, though, is a comparatively easy one to make in a mid-sized industrial city looking for skilled, well-paid work. Four hundred and fifty posts in advanced manufacturing, anchored to an export-oriented plant with a blue-chip client list, is the sort of announcement local authorities in central Portugal have spent years hoping to land. The test now will be whether the timeline holds and the hiring materialises as the first components roll off the line in 2028.
