Installation of Nvidia chips at Start Campus supports Portugal’s GDP

The arrival of Nvidia chips at the Start Campus data center in Sines contributed to strong investment growth in Portugal in the first three months of the year according to news source ECO today (Monday, June 1).

And the acceleration of investment, in turn, contributed to economic expansion. In the first quarter, the Portuguese economy grew by 2.3% year-on-year.

Data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) last Friday revealed that investment was the component that most helped the gross domestic product (GDP) to offset the drop in external production.

According to the INE, investment increased 9.2%, accelerating compared to the year-on-year variation of 4.9% observed for the previous three months.

Investment associated with machinery and equipment saw the largest increase, in contrast to investment associated with construction, which slowed down.

Between January and March, investment associated with machinery and equipment jumped 27.4% to around €3.6Bn.

This surge largely reflected the increase in imports of capital goods in automatic data processing machines. These “automatic data processing machines,” as referred to by the INE (National Institute of Statistics), are the Nvidia chips being installed in the first building of the Start Campus in Sines, which specialise in training and inferring large artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Source: ECO Online/Negócios; Credits: Start Campus