EDP's CEO, Miguel Stilwell d'Andrade, warned that Portugal and Spain need to define "clearly and in advance" the environmental, labor, and financial conditions to host data centers, otherwise the investment may go to other competing countries. The executive reacted to a Wall Street Journal article about the dispute over data centers in the United States, noting that Europe is far behind the USA and China in terms of data center capacity.
Stilwell d'Andrade emphasized that without computational capacity there is no artificial intelligence, no cloud infrastructure, and no many of the digital services that sustain the economy of the future, and warned of the risk of Europe repeating the strategic vulnerability created by dependence on energy imports. The EDP CEO considered that Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula have significant competitive advantages, including high penetration of cheap renewable energy, international fiber optic connectivity, and available land.
However, the executive stressed that this does not mean accepting all projects or lowering the country's ambitions, and that there is room to ensure that data centers create more value through qualified employment, tax revenues, opportunities for local companies, and investment in infrastructure. The debate, according to Stilwell d'Andrade, should not be "data centers: yes or no?", but rather about what standards projects must comply with and what contributions they should bring.
