By the end of 2026, Portugal is expected to have 20 submarine cables connected to its coast.
The direct investment involved is estimated at around €200 million. The much larger number is what could follow: more than €10 billion in technological and digital investment supported by the connectivity these cables provide.
Portugal’s geography has always mattered. For centuries, its Atlantic position was valuable because of ports, shipping routes and access to different continents.
The same position now gives the country direct digital connections between Europe, the Americas and Africa.
The cables themselves are only one part of the infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence and cloud services require enormous amounts of computing capacity. That means data centres, reliable energy, fibre networks, land, buildings and the ability to licence and construct projects quickly.
International connectivity makes Portugal more attractive, but it cannot compensate for weaknesses elsewhere in that chain.
This is also where digital infrastructure stops being only a technology story.
A large data centre is a real estate project and an energy project as much as it is a computing project. It needs suitable land, access to power, cooling, telecommunications infrastructure and planning decisions that increasingly have to be made at local level.
That creates a different kind of opportunity for Portugal. The economic value of a submarine cable does not end where it reaches the shore. It depends on how much activity can be built around that connection.
Portugal already has the geographical advantage. The question now is whether energy capacity, planning and local decision-making can move quickly enough to take advantage of it.
Twenty cables would put a remarkable amount of international connectivity on the Portuguese coast.
What happens on land will determine how valuable that becomes.
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