By Sergio Goncalves
LISBON (Reuters) -U.S. investment fund Davidson Kempner and British investment firm Pioneer Point Partners will jointly invest up to 3.5 billion euros ($4.2 billion) by 2025 in a large-scale data centre in Portugal to tap demand from global tech firms.
The two companies said in a joint statement on Friday the campus in the city of Sines, 150 km (93 miles) south of the capital Lisbon, will include five buildings with a useful capacity to supply up to 450 megawatts of cheap energy from renewable sources to the servers.
Prime Minister Antonio Costa later hailed the project as "the largest foreign direct investment in Portugal in recent decades", expecting Sines to attract further foreign investment with a government plan to install a green hydrogen production hub there.
The two firms said the centre, dubbed Sines 4.0, "will be one of the largest data centre campus projects in Europe and will address the exploding demand of large international technology companies".
They also pointed out that Sines has a strategic position as it is the place from which crucial high-speed trans-Atlantic submarine cables depart to other continents, such as Ellalink, which connects Europe to South America.
"Data has been identified as the new 'oil' of the digital economy, and Portugal will benefit from this large investment in Sines that will place the country at the core of transatlantic and global data network," said Sam Abboud, founding partner at Pioneer Point Partners.
Economy Minister Pedro Siza Vieira said "the COVID-19 pandemic showed that players from all over the world need to identify the best locations" for digital investment and were recognising Portugal's unique geographic location as Europe's connection point to the rest of the world via the Atlantic. ($1 = 0.8317 euros)