Portugal uniquely placed to attract AI to industry says minister

Portugal’s Minister for State Reform, Gonçalo Matias, says that Portugal is in a unique position to attract artificial intelligence to the industry the future.

Speaking at the AI Summit 2026, which brought together the CEOs of large companies on Wednesday, Gonçalo Matias said that the government would shortly approve the Interoperability Law which aims to ensure that state information systems can communicate with each other efficiently, securely, and transparently, facilitating data exchange and reducing bureaucracy for citizens and businesses.

Many of the companies represented at the summit are planning to set up data centres and gigafactories in Portugal.

The minister argued that the country has unique conditions to attract the future industry of artificial intelligence and that it has the talent.​

​“We are beginning to have the conditions to retain young people in Portugal,” proximity to the anchor points of several submarine cables, and benefits from an energy mix that is around 63% renewable, which provides us with “some of the cheapest energy in Europe,” he said.

Gonçalo Matias was speaking at the AI ​​Summit 2026, promoted by Jornal Económico, with the support of askblue, VisionWare, and Abreu Advogados.

He pointed to several steps in the reforms that the Government is undertaking to better serve citizens and improve the living conditions of companies and attractiveness for investment.

One of these steps is the National Data Center Plan, which has already been approved. “We don’t want Portugal to become a data center park, an experiment (…) There has to be an organised strategy that pre-selects locations, that ensures there is added value, that there is research and development done in our universities in collaboration with foreign universities and, also, we are trying to establish an industrial component, so that some component manufacturing is done in Portugal,” he aded.

It’s more difficult, he admits, “but it’s not impossible, especially if we create a cluster, if we create an industry around this.” And this, he emphasises, is not one of those clusters that appears today and disappears next month. The industry of the future is artificial intelligence.

Last week, the government approved the new public procurement code, and – Gonçalo Matias revealed – will soon approve the Interoperability Law, which finally implements the ‘one-time principle’ that has been discussed for years. In practice, he explained, information or documents that the State already possesses will no longer be required, through interoperability systems between public services.

In other words, different public entities will be able to automatically share documents instead of having multiple copies of the same documents.

“It is fundamental to ensure that people don’t waste time and resources going around the Public Administration chasing paperwork,” he stated.

Source: Jornal Economico. Credit: CARLOS M. ALMEIDA/LUSA
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