While the world debate about control of models like Claude Fable 5the Government of Spain has moved to try to gain positions in the race for technological sovereignty. The Council of Ministers has authorized a public investment of 719 million euros with one objective: to create an “Artificial Intelligence Gigafactory”. The investment is notable for a country like Spain, but it is a drop in an ocean absolutely dominated by large US technology companies.
The political signal here is strong. The European Commission wants to mobilize 20,000 million euros to develop AI projects. That money is reserved for gigafactories, and presents these data centers as a bet so that Europe does not depend only on external actors. Here Spain not late at allbecause it already has “AI Factories” linked to the EuroHPC consortium, and the MareNostrum 5 The BSC is precisely one of those reference centers. The Spanish project “will compete with a multi-site candidacy that includes the locations of Móra la Nova, in Tarragona, and San Fernando de Henares (Madrid), to house the gigafactory,” explains the official announcement.
Many unknowns. The announcement mixes things like public investment with the promise of strategic infrastructure. The problem is that it is one thing to “approve” the plan and another to build those data centers. We still need to know the final composition of the consortium that will provide the funds, the deadlines, and above all the fine print that clarifies who will have access to these data centers and who will manage them. The description of its scope is also ambiguous. There is talk of a service to the “Spanish AI ecosystem”, but it is not clear if this infrastructure will be available to end users or will be exclusive to public organizations and large companies.
Perspective puts everything in its place (for the worse). In the United States, private investment in data centers is skyrocketing. Only that belonging to venture capital companies reached 45.7 billion dollars in 2025. But as we know, the capex of large technology companies, dedicated almost entirely to AI, will reach 2026. the 673 billion dollars. In China the ambition is also colossal, and the country is already preparing an investment of about 295 billion dollars in the next five years to create data centers throughout the country.
China-Spain, compared. There are several ways to compare this data, and China is a good way to size this news:
- China is 19 times larger than Spain in surface area
- In addition, it is about 29 times larger in population
- China will invest more than 400 times Spain’s nominal investment, although it is true that the Chinese plan is five-year.
- In China, about 195 euros per person are invested, while in Spain about 15 euros per inhabitant are invested. China invests about 14 times more for each citizen.
- Chinese investment (again, five years) represents 1.5% of its GDP (0.3% per year). In Spain the figure would be close to 0.05% of GDP. Chinese investment could be considered six times higher in terms of GDP.
Who will have access. To understand who will have access to this gigafactory, the best mirror to look at is MareNostrum 5, which is not “public” in the sense of free use by any citizen. This, like other centers in the EuroHPC consortium, is supposed to be available to European researchers, industry, SMEs and startups. All of them can theoretically take advantage of this infrastructure with access requests to resources. This is not like someone who connects to chatgpt.com and starts working: whoever wants to use those resources must justify it and go through a bureaucratic process.
The data center is from Spain, its chips are not. Although the Government’s message is that of avoid dependency of foreign technology, the reality is obvious: those data centers may be in Tarragona and Madrid, but the chips with which the data will be processed They will be from the American company Nvidia and will be manufactured by the Taiwanese company TSMC. Europe and Spain are making efforts to try to mitigate this dependence, yes, but the reality is overwhelming: We continue to depend on these and many other companiesand it is not likely that we will stop doing so in the short or medium term.
Promises and realities. The approval of the project is undoubtedly good news, but once again this is at the moment more of a promise to act than an immediate initiative. There are no estimated dates or clear details about the execution of the project, and once again in both Europe and Spain It seems to be more important to say things than to do them.. Let’s hope that this investment soon crystallizes into a real project: the intention and purpose are good. Now it remains for them to come true.
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