Alastair Leithead, the former BBC correspondent who swapped Los Angeles for off-grid life in Portugal, has a new housemate: Ronaldo Romulus I, a six-month-old Portuguese mutt born on April Fool's Day. In his latest column for Portugal Resident, he runs a tongue-in-cheek theory that the puppy is a spy – watching everything, 'uploading' in his sleep and reporting back to the robot masters. It's comic writing, but it lands on a genuinely interesting local story: the giant data centre taking shape at Sines.
That project is worth knowing about if you're travelling Portugal's Atlantic coast. Microsoft's Smart Campus at Sines is slated to grow to six buildings by 2031 at a cost of €8.5 billion. Sustainability group ZERO estimates the finished 1.2GW site will draw 22% of all the electricity Portugal used on its national grid in 2025 – and drink two and a half times more water daily than Greater London. Two years ago Leithead toured the first of the six buildings, back when data centres felt like a novelty rather than a talking point.
There's a smarter side to the engineering, though. The campus plans to reuse the seawater cooling system from the coal-fired power station next door, which was decommissioned as Portugal pushed hard into renewables – more than 80% of the country's electricity generation is now renewable. Sines itself is a working port town on the Alentejo coast, known for its long beaches and industrial scale, and it's quietly becoming one of Europe's digital hubs.
The column also doubles as a light expat diary. Leithead describes the Starbucks naming ceremony that turned Alastair into Al back in LA, the Portuguese pronunciation of his name (roughly Alast-aye-EAR, rhyming with the verb trair – to betray), and the small absurdities of an age where writing 'AI' in a Zoom display name makes colleagues think they're being surveilled. Off-grid living in rural Portugal, it turns out, doesn't mean escaping the cloud – especially when your dog, your guests and your files are all, allegedly, being harvested.
For travellers, this is less news than a flavour of a side of Portugal most visitors skip: the Alentejo, sparsely populated, slow-moving and increasingly host to both off-gridders and hyperscale infrastructure. The humour is the draw here – it's a wry read for anyone fantasising about unplugging in the Portuguese countryside, with the punchline that even off-grid, you're never really off. And if you visit Sines, you can see for yourself where the servers live: the town sits about 90 minutes south of Lisbon, with sandy beaches, a castle and, soon, rather a lot of computing power.
