What does it mean to build digital infrastructure responsibly in Sines?

Last week, we published our Sustainability Update 2025, reflecting our SIN01 data center’s first full year of metered operations and an important step in the development of the wider 1.2 GW SINES Data Campus.

But behind the data is a bigger question.

As demand for AI and digital infrastructure accelerates, what should a data center actually mean for the community and region where it is built?

For us, that place is Sines.

Photo credit: Câmara Municipal de Sines

We are developing one of Europe’s largest data center campuses here, but our ambition has never been simply to build capacity. We want to demonstrate that infrastructure at this scale can be developed responsibly: in the way it uses resources, interacts with the environment and creates opportunity for the people around it.

Sines plays a fundamental role in making that possible.

The Atlantic is beside us. Portugal has significant renewable electricity generation. The region has a long industrial heritage, infrastructure and technical expertise. At the same time, this is an important coastal environment with communities and ecosystems that deserve long-term stewardship.

That combination has influenced our decisions from the beginning.

Our campus has been designed around sea water cooling, with the goal of reaching zero Water Usage Effectiveness by design. Our system gives a second life to intake and return infrastructure from the neighbouring decommissioned coal-fired power plant. Sea water passes through heat exchangers before being returned to the Atlantic, with the volume returned matching the volume abstracted.

At SIN01, 100% of operational electricity consumption in 2025 was matched annually with cancelled Guarantees of Origin from renewable electricity generated in Portugal.

But responsible infrastructure cannot be defined by engineering alone.

One of the things I feel most strongly about is ensuring that the opportunities created by the campus reach the region around us.

In 2025, Start Campus helped bring together the Escola Tecnológica do Litoral Alentejano (ETLA) and the Centre for European Data Center Education (CEDCE) to develop a professional training pathway for Critical Infrastructures Maintenance Technicians. The first five interns have already spent time learning inside a live operating environment at SIN01.

Through Superpowers Portugal, 279 kindergarten and first-grade children across 21 classrooms in Sines have also participated in programmes covering digital literacy, critical thinking and online safety.

And through GAMMA, our community investment fund, local organisations apply for support while the community itself helps select the projects that receive funding. Its first edition supported initiatives reaching around 190 children, 33 young people and 30 students, as well as delivering 151 in-home physiotherapy sessions across more than 5,400 kilometres of travel. 

While the campus is still in the early stages of its development, these programmes reflect the direction we want to take. As Start Campus expands, we aim for its contribution to the region to grow alongside it, creating lasting value through jobs, skills, partnerships and community investment. The same long-term thinking applies to the environment around us.

Approximately 55 hectares at Herdade das Pousadas Novas are being managed under a 25-year conservation programme. At sea, StartMarineBio has been monitoring marine ecosystems along the Sines coastline since 2023, establishing a baseline before sea water cooling operations began and enabling us to understand change over time.

Responsible development does not mean claiming that infrastructure has no impact. It means understanding that impact, reducing it wherever possible, measuring it properly and managing it for the long term.

That is also the thinking behind our Sustainability Update.

We have deliberately distinguished between what we can evidence today, what we are still measuring and what remains a design ambition. Our operating history is still developing, and our reporting will mature with it.

For me, there is a simple principle behind all of this.

We are not simply building digital infrastructure in Sines. We are building it with Sines.

And as the campus grows, its long-term success should be measured not only by the technology operating inside it, but by the value it creates for the environment, economy and community around it.

Thank You.