Portugal Presses Ahead With a Joint Iberian Bid to Host One of Europe's AI Gigafactories
Portugal says it still intends to bid, jointly with Spain, for one of seven EU-funded AI gigafactories, aiming at the large-scale lot. Lisbon has earmarked around €200 million for computing capacity, led by the Banco Português de Fomento, with the facility to be built on Portuguese soil.
Portugal is pressing ahead with a plan to host one of Europe's new artificial-intelligence "gigafactories," teaming up with Spain on a joint Iberian bid for a slice of a €10 billion European Union programme. The government says the political will to submit the candidacy remains firmly in place, even as the technical and financial demands of the project come into sharper focus.
The European Commission is funding a first wave of seven AI gigafactories — vast computing installations designed to give the bloc its own capacity to train and run advanced AI models, rather than depending on infrastructure abroad. The €10 billion of combined EU and national money is meant to unlock at least a further €20 billion in private capital to co-finance the sites. Portugal is aiming at the second, large-scale lot of the competition.
Under the plan, Portugal and Spain would run a single cross-border project, with the facility itself installed on Portuguese soil. Lisbon has earmarked around €200 million for computational capacity, with the Banco Português de Fomento (Portuguese Development Bank) leading the national side of the effort. Spain has already approved a considerably larger commitment of €719 million, reflecting the scale of the ambition on the other side of the border. The candidacy is being steered on the Portuguese side by Gonçalo Matias, the minister responsible.
The numbers behind a "large-scale" gigafactory are formidable. The first phase alone would require a minimum of 40,000 advanced AI processors — chips of the class of Nvidia's H100 or their equivalent — with a commitment to scale up to 100,000 in a second phase. EU support is pegged accordingly: up to €200 million for the initial stage and as much as €800 million for the expansion, provided the project clears the Commission's bar.
For Portugal, the appeal is twofold. There is the immediate draw of anchoring a marquee piece of European digital infrastructure — and the private investment, skilled jobs and prestige that come with it. And there is the longer game of technological sovereignty: the idea that Europe, and Portugal within it, should control the raw computing power on which the next generation of AI will be built, rather than renting it from American or Asian data centres.
The bid also dovetails with a broader push to sell the country as a natural home for energy-hungry computing. Portugal's selling points — plentiful renewable electricity and an Atlantic location with strong connectivity — are the same ones drawing private data-centre developers, though those projects have not been without friction over land, water and grid capacity.
Nothing is settled yet. The Commission must still weigh the Iberian proposal against rival bids from across the bloc, and the eventual winners will have to prove they can actually secure the chips, the power and the financing at the scale promised. But by reaffirming its intent to compete in the large-scale category, Portugal has signalled that it wants to be at the centre of Europe's AI build-out rather than on its periphery.
