“Portugal woke up to ‘data centres’ with Operation Influencer”

The “bottleneck” in the power grid already being felt in some of the main data centre markets could benefit Portugal as an alternative destination, argues the president of PortugalDC, Luís Pedro Duarte, who estimates that the country could attract more than 12 billion euros of investment in the sector over the next five years. A significant part will be channelled into infrastructure fit for the requirements of artificial intelligence (AI), he predicts.

The president of PortugalDC also believes that Operation Influencer — the ongoing judicial investigation involving the project to build a large data centre campus in Sines, which made national news because it culminated in the resignation of the then prime minister António Costa — may have helped to raise national awareness of the role these facilities play: “For better or worse, the word ended up on the Portuguese agenda”, he observes.