SUSTAINABILITY
START CAMPUS – PORTUGAL
Start Campus is developing a 1.2GW, six-building campus on the site of a former coal-fired power station at Sines. Its sustainability model rests on reusing that site’ s infrastructure: the campus draws seawater through the plant’ s existing intake and runs it through a once-through cooling system, with heat exchangers keeping seawater out of the data halls.
The company’ s Sustainability Update 2025, published on 30 September, covers the first full year of metered operation at SIN01. All of the building’ s operational electricity was matched annually with renewable electricity generated in Portugal. The cooling system abstracted 692,942m ³ of seawater and returned the same volume, no potable water was used for cooling and 93.2 % of operational waste was recycled. SIN01 also achieved LEED Gold, operated without disruption through the Iberian grid outage of 28 April 2025 and approximately 55 hectares of the site are managed under a 25-year conservation programme.
The report separates these measured results from the design targets of a PUE of 1.1 and WUE of zero for the full campus. Those targets will be tested as density rises: SIN01 already hosts Nscale’ s NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra deployment for Microsoft, and later buildings are planned at 180MW to 240MW each.
datacentremagazine. com 79