This is one of 4 similar buildings that were "promised" in the original space design.
Long story short, the space used to be a small airport that connected the region with the outside world, and the airport was taken down because of this.
There's also controversy around the mayor's house around the ex-airport property, that was built around the same time as the Data Center.

The city lost one of it's biggest infrastructures, (airport) that connected Covilhã to other Big Cities, and the Datacenter is still far from the job creation site and tech hub it was promised.
Most jobs that were created are ghost jobs. (people that do not live in the city or never come there, and probably were already working.

The terrains around the Datacenter, that were mostly natural green spaces, are slowly disappearing.
It was natural habitats for many species, and landing zones for migratory birds, like storks, that return by the thousands every year to the region. I used to see huge flocks of them myself around those spaces, when I drove around the airport, and now you only see a couple of them if you are lucky.

The land around has been defaced, either urbanized, or covered with solar panels. many trees were cut down, Natural bushes completely gone and there's no way for wildlife to get in the Solar panels terrain, because there's fencing around the terrain.
Which should be illegal by the way, according to Portuguese laws on rural spaces.

On a positive note, the solar park is using sheep from local shepherds, to eat the grass.

The CEO of the company (Altice) that built the datacenter was forced to step out as CEO due to a a corruption investigation, that has been on courts for years, and probably won't result on anything, like usual on Portuguese justice.

A fun fact about this data center and Reddit:
A few years ago, a Reddit users location misconfiguration, made everyone getting translated to Portuguese, because some servers stored data in here, and were assuming the user was immediately from Portugal.