Spanish and Catalan authorities meet with promoters of AI gigafactory

Catalan president Salvador Illa and Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez met on Wednesday at the Spanish government headquarters in Moncloa with representatives of the consortium promoting the Artificial Intelligence gigafactory that will be headquartered in Móra la Nova.

This is the first meeting at the highest political and business level after the approval of €719 million for the project.

The meeting reflects the commitment of the various administrations for the project before Brussels publishes the definitive call for European gigafactories.

The meeting comes when the consortium is practically set up and the commercial company has already been approved by both Spanish and Catalan authorities. 

The project will be under majority control of the private sector, which will hold 51% of the capital of the driving company. Telefónica, ACS, and Banco Santander will be the three main private shareholders, with a stake of 15.67% each, while the Basque technology company Multiverse Computing will have 4%.

The public part will control the remaining 49%. The Spanish government will hold 47.99% of the shares and the Catalan government will initially participate with 1%.

The distribution responds to European requirements, which require a private majority in this type of strategic infrastructure.

Sánchez highlighted that artificial intelligence is one of the technologies that "will most transform society in the coming decades, in areas such as work, research, learning and personal relationships."

For this reason, he urged continuing to work to build and govern strategic technologies so that Spain contributes, "with political ambition and investment, to making Europe able to lead key technological areas, regain competitiveness, and strengthen its capacity to decide on the Spanish and European digital future."

The Móra la Nova gigafactory is intended to house thousands of state-of-the-art processors to train large artificial intelligence models and offer advanced computing capacity to companies, research centers and administrations.

The overall investment is between €4-5 billion.