United States and China are winning the artificial intelligence game. However, Europe and Spain, in particular, are also playing their part in this great digital revolution.
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Spanish entrepreneurs have stepped up to make the most of the adoption of this technology. It is true that, for now, no one aims to create a rival to ChatGPT but rather to design hundreds of applications, create microchips, and install large data centers that provide the necessary capacity to process information.
The sector is in its initial phase but has universities, research, and a digital ecosystem
Multiverse Computing, Cala AI, Biorce, Openchip, Ideaded, Alinia, Carto, Freepik, Galtea, Supersonic, Denodo, Sherpa AI, TinyBird… are just some of the main players in a vibrant ecosystem that today consists of about 450 startups, according to the latest data available in the report The spanish tech ecosystem report 2026 .
According to the study, prepared by Dealroom, these companies have raised 717 million in the last year, which represents 23% of all startup investment in Spain in 2025. “It is necessary to put these data into perspective. If we consider them since 2020, the AI ecosystem has raised 3.3 billion euros, placing the country in sixth position in the European ranking of total investment volume,” points out Justo Hidalgo, AI director at the business association Adigital. In this area, Spain even surpasses Italy. However, ahead are powers like France, Germany, or the United Kingdom, economies larger than Spain’s, but also Sweden and Switzerland, countries very focused on high technology. There is still a way to go.
“At the local level, the sector is in an initial takeoff phase but has all the ingredients to accelerate: universities, research centers like the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and a digital ecosystem consolidated for years,” says Miquel Martí, CEO of the association Tech Barcelona.
Most companies are concentrated, logically, between Madrid and Barcelona due to the strength of the local tech sector. According to this report, both cities rank fifth and sixth, respectively, in the European ranking of cities with the highest concentration of specialized AI talent. “We see that in Madrid engineers are concentrated in Ibex35 corporations, while in Barcelona, there is a greater presence of specialists in research centers and innovative companies and large tech firms like Amazon and Apple,” says startup investor Carlos Trenchs, founding partner of the Masia fund.
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Madrid and Barcelona are the fifth and sixth AI specialized talent hubs in Europe
It is also necessary to value European talent compared to American: in terms of AI specialists, they are on par: “each block has about 325,000 professionals,” according to Dealroom calculations. In this context, Trenchs adds that “Europe has a great opportunity since in the U.S. 40% of AI professionals work in the seven big tech companies, whereas in Europe, this percentage is only 17%, which means there are more specialists dedicated to research and startups generating new business ideas,” he indicates.
In the AI ecosystem, there are three major opportunities: the so-called fundamentals, where Spain and Europe have lost the race because there is no LLM language model that directly competes against ChatGPT; infrastructure, where Spain is now starting to step up with data centers, a gigafactory, and chip design; and the third is the world of AI applications. “This is where there is the most potential because Europe has very consolidated vertical sectors, such as health, finance, or energy, and with all this prior experience, it is possible to innovate with AI playing with an advantage,” comments Trenchs.
The opportunity for Spain, and Europe, lies in application development
According to Adigital, Spain also has a chance to counterbalance the U.S. and China by positioning itself internationally with AI application through good governance practices: “initiatives like regulatory sandboxes place Spain in an interesting position to test and deploy these systems with legal certainty and proper supervision,” says Hidalgo.
The challenges AI faces to grow in Spain are, at heart, well-known to the entire digital ecosystem. Trenchs points out that the country still needs large investment funds to boost startups on a large scale, although it is true that in early stages the investment needs of companies are already covered. He also adds that it is necessary to increase “the speed of project execution by entrepreneurs and large corporations since the AI industry demands growth at full speed: time is gold,” he assures.
The public sector bets with Alia, the Perte chip, RedIA, or the AI gigafactory in Móra la Nova
The public sector can play a key role in boosting this critical technology. From Adigital, they point out that Spain has some of the most ambitious public projects in Europe. The most relevant is the Perte Chip, which mobilizes more than 12 billion euros to strengthen the country’s capacity in semiconductors and computing. Additionally, initiatives like ALIA, the public AI model in Spanish, and programs like RedIA allocate 180 million euros to accelerate AI adoption in companies and the healthcare system. Moreover, Spain is also a protagonist in the EU for having presented a joint candidacy with Portugal that aims to deploy – in the Tarragona municipality of Móra la Nova – an AI gigafactory, an immense data center capable of processing huge amounts of data
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