The east-west traffic point is underrated. Once AI clusters talk to each other more than to end users, fibre that follows the power grid, as REN's does, becomes a strategic asset rather than a connectivity product. Did anyone at the conference address who will actually operate the compute in these Portuguese AI factories: European operators, or mostly US hyperscalers renting the land and the power?
That was actually one of the interesting tensions. The first big deployments suggest a hybrid model rather than a purely Portuguese one: in Sines, European-headquartered Nscale operates the AI infrastructure at Start Campus, but the anchor customer is Microsoft: already 12,600 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, with 66,000+ Rubin GPUs planned from late 2027.
The more strategic experiment is EuroHPC: its AI Gigafactories are explicitly supposed to be built and operated in Europe, with governments buying compute capacity rather than simply subsidising real estate and electricity. We have several articles about the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre / Marenostrum 5 an real work we are doing there. This interview is also relevant:
So perhaps the real sovereignty test for Portugal is not whether we host the GPUs, but who owns the orchestration layer, sells the compute and captures the margin above the megawatt. That is where the next infrastructure battle will be.
The east-west traffic point is underrated. Once AI clusters talk to each other more than to end users, fibre that follows the power grid, as REN's does, becomes a strategic asset rather than a connectivity product. Did anyone at the conference address who will actually operate the compute in these Portuguese AI factories: European operators, or mostly US hyperscalers renting the land and the power?
That was actually one of the interesting tensions. The first big deployments suggest a hybrid model rather than a purely Portuguese one: in Sines, European-headquartered Nscale operates the AI infrastructure at Start Campus, but the anchor customer is Microsoft: already 12,600 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, with 66,000+ Rubin GPUs planned from late 2027.
The more strategic experiment is EuroHPC: its AI Gigafactories are explicitly supposed to be built and operated in Europe, with governments buying compute capacity rather than simply subsidising real estate and electricity. We have several articles about the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre / Marenostrum 5 an real work we are doing there. This interview is also relevant:
https://www.buildingcreativemachines.com/p/interview-mariona-sanz-ausas-barcelona?utm_source=publication-search
So perhaps the real sovereignty test for Portugal is not whether we host the GPUs, but who owns the orchestration layer, sells the compute and captures the margin above the megawatt. That is where the next infrastructure battle will be.