NEWS
Start Campus and EDP Partner to Accelerate Renewable-Powered Data Centres in Portugal
Start Campus and EDP have signed a strategic partnership to accelerate renewable-powered data centre development in Portugal, with potential expansion into other markets.
Under a Memorandum of Understanding( MoU), the companies will combine expertise to deliver competitive, sustainable computational capacity aligned with Europe’ s digital and decarbonization ambitions.
The agreement is built on three pillars: accelerating renewable energy to meet rising digital demand while strengthening grid resilience and system stability; establishing EDP as Start Campus’ preferred long-term green energy partner; and exploring collaboration in Sines and future developments across Portugal and beyond.
The framework aligns investment in energy and digital infrastructure, initially anchored at the SINES Data Campus, reinforcing Portugal’ s role in Europe’ s green transition.
Ana Quelhas, EVP Hydrogen and Data Centres, EDP said electricity demand from data centres is rising rapidly, with Europe expected to add 70 TWh of consumption by 2030. She said EDP is ready to scale reliable renewable electricity and energy management solutions to support digital infrastructure growth in Portugal.
Robert Dunn, CEO, Start Campus, said digital infrastructure and renewable energy must advance together at scale with resilience in mind. He said aligning Start Campus’ platform with EDP’ s energy leadership creates an integrated approach to sustainable digital growth.
Supported by Davidson Kempner, the partnership will advance technical and commercial solutions to enhance price stability, reduce import reliance and enable next-generation infrastructure.
Nokia and Telefónica expand AI-ready Edge data centers across Spain
Telefónica has selected Nokia to deploy AI-ready networking solutions across new Edge data center sites throughout Spain – advancing the nation’ s next-generation digital infrastructure.
Under an exclusive multi-year agreement, Nokia will deliver connectivity for 17 distributed Edge nodes, 12 of which are already operational.
The deployment strengthens Telefónica’ s shift toward a distributed Edge architecture that brings compute and storage
closer to end users. Designed to support AI training and inferencing at the Edge, the new infrastructure will power digital services across healthcare, education, industry and government while reinforcing Spain’ s data sovereignty and technological leadership in Europe.
Nokia is providing high-speed, ultra-low latency and highly reliable connectivity within each Edge facility, linking compute and storage environments and connecting each site to external networks.
The rollout includes Telefónica’ s flagship Tecno-Alcalá data center, one of the largest facilities globally.
The agreement builds on a successful 2024 pilot involving three initial Edge data centers and establishes Nokia as Telefónica’ s sole networking technology partner for this nationwide expansion. The single-vendor model simplifies operations, unifies architecture and improves efficiency across the program.
Connectivity inside the Edge data centers is powered by Nokia’ s 7220 Interconnect Router data center switches and 7750 Service Router gateways, enabling deep automation, multicloud integration and agile scalability to meet evolving AI and cloud demands. www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO EUROPE
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