Nscale Expands Microsoft AI Deal With 66,000 Rubin GPUs in Portugal

Nscale plans to deploy more than 66,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs at Portugal’s SINES Data Campus beginning in late 2027, expanding its collaboration with Microsoft and Start Campus as Europe races to secure AI compute capacity.

The London-based AI cloud infrastructure company said on Tuesday the deployment will follow an earlier rollout of more than 12,600 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs at the campus’ first building for Microsoft workloads.

The expansion will include €230 million of additional investment into shared infrastructure and another €465 million for a second 200-megawatt building at the Sines site, according to the company. Nscale described the project as one of the largest AI infrastructure investments in Portugal and among the most significant in the European Union.

The deal adds to a growing wave of hyperscale AI infrastructure commitments across Europe, where governments and enterprises are increasingly focused on sovereign AI capacity and reducing reliance on U.S.-based infrastructure hubs. The Sines campus, developed by Start Campus, is fully permitted for up to 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity, positioning it among the largest planned AI and data center developments in Europe.

Nscale said the latest agreement builds on existing Microsoft-related deployments in Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“This partnership enables the deployment of next-generation AI compute at the scale and efficiency required for frontier workloads,” Nscale founder and CEO Josh Payne said in a statement.

The announcement comes as AI infrastructure providers scramble to secure power, land and GPU supply amid surging demand for large-scale model training and inference capacity through the end of the decade. NVIDIA’s Rubin platform, the successor to its Blackwell systems, is expected to underpin next-generation AI clusters designed for increasingly compute-intensive workloads.

The move also continues Nscale’s aggressive expansion push over the past year as the company seeks to position itself as a European AI infrastructure challenger to U.S.-centric cloud and GPU providers.

Last week, Nscale hired former Oracle data center executive Sam Huckaby as president of data centers, signaling a deeper operational push into hyperscale AI infrastructure development. The company has also been expanding its footprint in Norway and Texas while marketing high-density AI campuses backed by renewable energy and large-scale power availability.