View of the University of Minho's Azurém campus in Guimarães

Tech 2 August 2026

Guimarães is getting Portugal's new advanced computing data centre for €5.1 million

The National Advanced Computing Centre gets a new home on the University of Minho's Azurém campus, with works due to finish in September 2026.

Talk about supercomputers in Portugal and the conversation almost always ends up in Sines, or on Deucalion. But the infrastructure that actually holds up the country’s scientific computing is getting a new home somewhere less obvious: the University of Minho’s Azurém campus in Guimarães.

The National Advanced Computing Centre’s new data centre represents a €5.1 million investment, and the build, awarded to the dst group, is due to finish in September 2026. The project is run by the Foundation for Science and Technology and financed through the Recovery and Resilience Plan, under its Digital Science Plus investment line.

What is actually going inside it?

Advanced computing equipment in the service of science and innovation: systems belonging to the University of Minho itself, infrastructure tied into European supercomputing networks, plus telecoms equipment supporting RCTS, the network that links Portugal’s universities and research centres to one another.

Translated: this is not a commercial data centre renting servers to companies. It is the shared backbone where Portuguese research does its arithmetic — climate simulations, computational biology, materials science, and increasingly the training and inference of AI models.

Why should anyone outside research care?

Because compute has become base infrastructure, like roads or fibre. If you have nowhere to run the models you do not do the research, and if you do not do the research you do not keep the people who know how. Portugal is playing that hand on several fronts at once: Sines’ bid for one of Europe’s AI gigafactories is the headline version, and the new AI centre at Instituto Superior Técnico is another piece of the same puzzle.

Details of the funding programme and the approved projects live on the Foundation for Science and Technology’s site. Guimarães, meanwhile, adds another line to a CV that already had a castle, a European Capital of Culture and a university pulling hard on all of it.

By Oliver Grant

Image: a m / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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