Siemens Chooses Lisbon and Porto for New AI & UX Hubs, Creating 250 Jobs

Portugal’s tech scene has been making headlines for years, but few announcements have landed with the weight of Siemens’ latest move: two brand-new centres dedicated to artificial intelligence and user-experience design will open in the country next year, adding fresh jobs, prestige and global responsibilities to the local operation.

Snapshot: what matters now

• €1 billion global plan: the two Portuguese hubs form part of Siemens’ three-year, company-wide investment in AI.

• 250 specialised hires on day one—and head-count expected to grow.

• Portugal already ranks as Siemens’ 6th-largest competence centre worldwide, handling projects from industrial digitalisation to urban metaverses.

Why Siemens is doubling down on Portugal

For a multinational that employs more than 320,000 people globally, another office might look routine. Yet insiders say the Lisbon and Porto hubs will become the nerve-centre for AI governance and UX research across a swathe of Siemens’ industrial software portfolio. In other words, Portuguese engineers will influence how factories, smart-grids and medical devices are designed from Boston to Bangalore.

Several factors helped tilt the decision south-west:– A time-zone sweet spot that lets teams bridge Asia and the Americas in the same working day.– Local universities such as Instituto Superior Técnico and Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto that repeatedly sit in global top-100 engineering lists.– Competitive labour costs—without the productivity penalty many rivals fear.

“Portugal is Siemens’ best-kept secret,” chief executive Sofia Tenreiro told reporters, emphasising the country’s multilingual talent pipeline and an ecosystem “ready to scale faster than larger markets allow”.

What the new AI & UX hubs will actually do

The AI centre will house data scientists, cognitive-systems architects and machine-learning ops teams. First assignments include:• Building frameworks that ensure Siemens’ industrial algorithms meet European AI Act compliance standards.• Developing “edge” models small enough to run in a wind turbine or hospital scanner but accurate enough to slash downtime.

Alongside, the UX unit will focus on human-machine interfaces for sectors where safety, speed and intuitive design are mission-critical—think power-plant dashboards or autonomous-train control rooms. Combining the two skills in one country, Siemens argues, speeds the feedback loop between algorithm designers and interface architects.

Portugal’s quiet allure: talent, time zones and tax breaks

Legislators have added fuel by rolling out the Incentivo Fiscal à Investigação Científica e Inovação (IFICI), capping personal income tax at 20 % for high-skilled arrivals, and trimming the corporate rate to 20 %—with an even lower band for the first €50,000 of profit at small firms. Layer in grants such as the “Voucher Deep Tech” (€60k) or the “IA nas PME” fund that covers up to 75 % of project costs, and the calculus tilts further toward Iberia.

Geography also plays a part. A three-hour flight puts Lisbon within reach of 30+ European capitals, while direct links to São Paulo and New York open doors to the Americas. Add atlantic undersea cables and a swelling supply of renewable electricity, and Portugal looks tailor-made for data-hungry industries.

A broader trend: multinationals queue for an Iberian address

Siemens is hardly alone. Over the past two years DAPCHER, Flix, Richemont, Five9 and the Nasdaq group, among others, have planted hubs from Braga to Faro. Logistics giant DACHSER chose Porto for its second-largest IT centre globally; luxury conglomerate Richemont’s Lisbon tech campus is hiring cloud and data-science teams at pace; meanwhile Mastercard’s vast cyber-security nerve-centre is rewiring payment systems for Europe from an office overlooking the Tagus.

These moves come despite higher borrowing costs and talent shortages elsewhere in Europe. Analysts at consultancy Dealroom estimate that foreign tech outfits committed around €1.6 B to Portuguese R&D facilities between 2023-24—a figure likely to swell once Siemens’ own capex lands on the books.

Opportunities—and new headaches—for local workers

For engineers, designers and product managers, Siemens’ expansion signals a career-path upgrade without the need to relocate to Berlin or Boston. Salaries for senior AI roles in Portugal have already risen 15 % since 2022, according to recruiter Landing.Jobs, yet remain roughly 30 % below those in Germany—part of the magnet for big employers.

Universities see upsides too: partnerships often translate into funded PhDs, guest lectures and joint patent filings. The catch? A talent tug-of-war is brewing. Start-ups complain that they cannot match corporate pay cheques, while midsize Portuguese firms fret about losing staff just as EU recovery funds push them to digitise.

Looking ahead: can the momentum hold?

Government incentives have an expiry date, and utility costs—especially grid connections for energy-intensive data clusters—remain a bottleneck. Nonetheless, with two large Siemens hubs about to come online, Portugal’s claim to be a global test-bed for industrial AI looks stronger than ever.

If those centres manage to ship products that matter—not simply local proof-of-concepts but tools adopted across Siemens’ €77 B empire—Lisbon and Porto may well be writing the software that powers Europe’s next industrial cycle. For a nation of 10 M residents, that is more than a head-count statistic; it is a statement of capacity—and of ambition.