In 40 years they have gone from manufacturing printers to manufacturing the future

Exactly 40 years ago, HP packed up its original facilities in Terrassa (Barcelona) and moved to land on the outskirts of Sant Cugat del Vallés (Barcelona) to expand facilities that the success of your printers left small.

We have visited those same HP facilities in Spain and, although the machines that manufactured printers have been turned off a long time ago, we have discovered the equivalent of a small Silicon Valley in Spain from which you imagine what will the technological future be like.

From growing cereals to generating ideas

The center located in Sant Cugat del Vallés celebrates 40 years since, in 1985, the company moved its facilities, taking with them the 30 employees that made up its staff at that time.

In those years, the facility was designed as a production center for its printers. However, in 2000, production was relocated to Asia. Given the new situation, the center was on the brink of closure. The Sant Cugat facilities, already with more than 800 employees, of which 200 were engineers, were reinvented, transforming the center into a factory of ideas and a laboratory of innovations that has not stopped growing in its four decades of existence.

Currently, the center has 11 buildings that house 2,600 employees of 60 nationalities, of which 800 are engineers who work hand in hand with other companies to develop new practical solutions for their businesses.

“In 1985, there were farms here and now this space has become the Silicon Valley of the city,” Helena Herrero, HP president of Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told us proudly. No wonder, she was part of that team that made possible its transformation into one of the two largest HP R&D centers in Europe and the worldcomparable to that of HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

Symbolic testimony of this spirit of development is the detailed recreation of the famous garage where Hewlett and Packard created HP 85 years ago in Palo Alto that welcomed us. In that garage not only was Hewlett Packard born as a company, but it served as inspiration for the creation of that ecosystem of companies that we know today as Silicon Valley.

As happened in Silicon Valley, around the recreation of that garage, HP has created a center for innovation and development of new ideas and products that will be decisive for the future in areas as diverse as Formula 1, prosthetic medicineculture, construction or work efficiency. This center registers more than 150 patents a year for HP.

Ideas that have come true and we have been able to see and touch

One of the peculiarities of this HP center is that companies come asking for help to solve a problem and the HP teams work with them to find innovative solutions.

The most recent example is the collaboration of these engineers with the Ferrari Formula 1 team. In this case, the challenge was to lighten the weight of the car as much as possible without compromising the aerodynamic sliding of its body.

Daniel Martínez, head of the large format printing division and director of the center, told us that the Sant Cugat engineering team developed a latex print that was then applied to the body of the vehicle like vinyl. This sheet reduced its weight by 17% compared to conventional paint without compromising aerodynamics.

In our visit to this HP ideas laboratory We saw that engineers are developing solutions in other, much more futuristic areas in which robotics and printing come together.

That idea born within these walls has given rise to the project SitePrinta hybrid between a printer and a robot vacuum cleaner that print on the ground the dimensions of the plans of work.

Combining a complex system of positioning and inclination sensors, they allow the robot to determine its position in space and detect unevenness in the terrain, providing additional information to the construction team.

Another real application that has been developed in this avant-garde center in Barcelona has to do with the 3D printing development with new techniques and materials with technology Metal Jet. Among its novelties, the use of generative AI to simplify the design of the parts to be printed or the development of 3D printing with metals to manufacture high precision mechanical parts and components.

One of the pieces that personally surprised me the most about this technology is the possibility of combining, in the same continuous printing job, flexible materials, with a rubber-like texture, and rigid areas with the hardness of a metal. These technological solutions open a whole range of opportunities for the field of prostheses and cast replacements with 3D printing.

New turn towards the future: AI

As a symbol of the innovative spirit and reinvention of this center in Sant Cugat, HP has rehabilitated a 15th century farmhouse that was in a state of semi-ruin on the land occupied by the enormous HP technology campus, and has converted it into La Masia Experience Design Center, the spiritual center of its new stage with the creation of the HP AI Innovation Hub.

With this new hub focused on AI, the Barcelona facilities become the reference center in Europe for the development of AI LMM models that HP will use in its future products: from AI agents premises on their computers to videoconferencing assistance systems, to give some examples that are already on the market.

The new AI hub will collaborate transversally in 14 business units of the company and with all the development centers that the company has throughout the world, especially with its headquarters in Palo Alto, where there is also a team specialized in AI development.

As happened in 1985 and later in 2000, with the creation of the HP AI Innovation Hub, The Sant Cugat HP center is transformed again with a team of 200 engineers dedicated exclusively to the development of AI.

Helena Herrero has not given specific data on the growth projection of this initial workforce dedicated to AI, but she has highlighted the reskilling that current employees have carried out towards the artificial intelligence skills.

“The center is a school of global talent, where numerous professionals who started in Sant Cugat today occupy key positions in the company, including Enrique Lores, current global CEO of HP, who started as an intern here in Sant Cugat,” highlighted Inés Bermejo, general director of HP Iberia. The center collaborates with the different universities of Barcelona to train and attract the best talent local technology.

In statements by Daniel Martínez, this new team will collaborate hand in hand with the main AI players (OpenAI, NVIDIA, etc.) to develop new products and integrate them into new tools for their clients. “We are at that inflection point to take that momentum for the future,” said Herrero.

In Xataka | HP is betting everything on AI at work. Their plan: reinvent until printing

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