Nscale Books €695 Million for a Second 200MW Sines Building With 66,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs for Microsoft — Late-2027 Deployment Builds on the 12,600 Blackwell Ultra Stack at Start Campus' 1.2GW Permitted Site
Nscale committed €695 million on Tuesday to expand its Sines Data Campus collaboration with Microsoft and Start Campus — €230 million in shared infrastructure and €465 million for a second 200MW building hosting 66,000+ NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs from late 2027.
British AI infrastructure operator Nscale on Tuesday committed €695 million to expand its Sines Data Campus collaboration with Microsoft and Start Campus, pencilling in 66,000-plus NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs to come online from late 2027. The investment breaks into €230 million for shared infrastructure across the campus and €465 million for a second 200MW building, set to sit alongside the first hall already hosting more than 12,600 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs for Microsoft.
The announcement, released through PR Newswire and confirmed by Start Campus on Tuesday, 5 May 2026, lands as one of the largest single AI-infrastructure commitments to date in Portugal — and slots a second tenant building into a Sines site already permitted for 1.2 gigawatts of capacity. The Vera Rubin platform is NVIDIA's next-generation successor to Blackwell Ultra, and the Sines deployment will be among the first at scale in continental Europe.
From 12,600 Blackwell Ultras to 66,000 Vera Rubins on the Same Coastline
Nscale's first Sines building, already in deployment for Microsoft, is hosting over 12,600 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and is scheduled to come fully live in the first quarter of 2026. The new 200MW hall extends that footprint roughly five-fold by GPU count and lifts the campus' role from a single anchor build into a multi-building AI cluster.
Robert Dunn, chief executive of Start Campus — the Davidson Kempner-backed Portuguese operator developing the Sines campus — said the site "is one of Europe's leading destinations for large-scale AI" and that the expansion strengthens "Europe's ability to support sovereign AI development." Daniel Boehm, partner at Davidson Kempner, framed the build as evidence that the Start Campus platform "is well positioned to scale — reinforcing Portugal's emergence as an AI leader in Europe." Nscale chief executive Josh Payne said the partnership enables "deployment of next-generation AI compute at the scale and efficiency required for frontier workloads."
PUE 1.1, WUE 0 and 100% Renewables — Why the Atlantic Coast Wins on Cooling
The Sines campus' technical envelope is what tilts the AI-cluster economics. Start Campus targets a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.1 — close to the theoretical floor — and a Water Usage Effectiveness of zero, achieved by harnessing the Atlantic for closed-loop cooling rather than evaporative towers. The site runs on 100 percent renewable energy, drawing from Portugal's grid mix that closed 2025 with renewables consistently above 70 percent of generation.
The deep-water port at Sines, the SIPS subsea fibre landings and the proximity to the high-voltage transmission backbone all sit beneath the operational case. The 1.2GW permitted ceiling means that even after the second 200MW hall comes online, the campus retains substantial runway for further expansion.
The Portugal Macro Read — Copenhagen Economics' €26bn GDP Bet
For the country, the Nscale-Microsoft commitment is the second leg of a build-out that started with Microsoft's $10 billion data-centre programme announcement in late 2024 and the broader €8.6 billion AI hub roadmap. Copenhagen Economics — in research commissioned by the wider data-centre industry — has forecast that data-centre investment could contribute up to €26 billion (US$30.4 billion) to Portugal's GDP by 2030, generating tens of thousands of jobs over the build cycle.
The Tuesday announcement is the kind of capex line that AICEP and the Ministry of Economy fold into their inward-investment dashboards: a marquee multinational anchor, on a renewable-energy site, in a strategic European corner. The Vera Rubin deployment also pulls Portugal closer to a sovereign-AI conversation that Brussels has been having with Paris, Berlin and Stockholm — and gives Lisbon a credible compute-capacity argument inside it.
The €465 million second building begins construction this year, with first GPU deliveries pencilled in for late 2027. Microsoft has not disclosed which workloads the new capacity will host, but the scale — 66,000-plus Rubin GPUs — points squarely at training-class clusters for the next generation of frontier models.
