Spain wants to have an AI gigafactoría, and has presented its candidate: a town in Tarragona. Specifically, Morá la Nova, who wants to become one of the headquarters of that great European project. The proposal has been presented by a business consortium led by Telefónica and promoted by the Government of Spain in cooperation with the Generalitat of Catalonia. Spain wants to be a reference point in this new technology gold fever.
Why Tarragona. The candidacy responds to strategic reasons: that enclave would be close to the factoring of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Supercomputing Center (BSC -CNS), one of the great European nodes in high performance computing. The location also brings together conditions such as the availability of the land and the necessary electrical power.
5,000 million euros. Moncloa sources indicate in the country to be chosen, the investment for this project would reach 5,000 million euros and would provide both public and private sources. It is a notable amount that allows the EU requirements to be met to create these “AI gigafactories.”
What is a gigafactoría de ia. In February, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyden, announced the investor project. The idea, mobilize 200,000 million euros at AI, including a fund of 20,000 million for gigafactories. Or what is the same, large data centers with about 100,000 last -generation AI chips. They are even more ambitious projects than those that are already underway with the factories (without “giga”) that the EU has already promoted a few months ago.
European AI data centers. The European initiative began with the launch of seven AI factories that were announced in December. These are somewhat more modest facilities that remain relevant. Among them was the BSC-CNS, which will have a data center in which the EU investment will be about 200 million euros. It is now expected that five other megaprojects will be announced that, yes, will have much greater investment and will have a capacity up to four times greater.
Who is behind the Spanish project. The candidacy of Tarragona is endorsed by the Government, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Generalitat, but also by a group of companies led by Telefónica. Companies such as ACS, Masorange, Nvida, Submer, Multivrse Computing and the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) have already confirmed their participation.
Deadlines. After the selection of the headquarters, the gigafactories will have to be operational between 2027 and 2028. They will be able to access community financing and those projects between 3,000 and 5,000 million euros will receive up to 35% of the investment of public funds. Gone seems to have remained that more efficient projects that were discussed after the appearance of Deepseek.
Will they compete with the big data centers of the Big Tech? It is interesting to note that a gigafactoría of AI like the one raised in Tarragona is on the promising role in computing capacity. In fact, Meta announced in December a similar project in the US with an investment of 10,000 million dollars. Colossus, the AI Data Center that XAI launched at the end of 2024, uses 100,000 NVIDIA GPUS, has a power of 150 MW. It is estimated that each MW of power in data centers has a cost of between 7 and 12 million dollars.
Image | European Commission | Wikimedia
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