Yesterday AMETIC inaugurated the 40th edition of its Digital Economy and Telecommunications Meeting, the event that inaugurates the technological course in our country. This special edition, which commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the forum, has finally included the participation of the Minister for Digital Transformation and the Public Service, Óscar López, who has officially opened the meeting and announced a set of public aid, estimated at around 180 million euros, with which he intends for our country to become one of the leaders of the technological drive in the Old Continent.
Francisco Hortigüela, president of AMETIC, was in charge of opening the meeting, highlighting that “services and technological development are a moral and ethical obligation to improve people’s lives.” In his speech, Hortigüela pointed out the loss of competitiveness in Europe and Spain as the main challenge. As he pointed out in his speech “to maintain the current state of well-being it is necessary that we improve competitiveness, a competitiveness that both Europe and Spain have lost in recent decades.” To reverse this trend, he opted to reinforce public and private investment that will narrow the gap with global powers and strengthen Spain in the digital economy.
Under the motto ‘Digitalization, Competitiveness and Social Impact. The great equation’, this new edition brings together more than 175 speakers in 35 sessions to debate a hypersector that today employs 840,000 people and has a turnover of more than 146,000 million euros through 37,000 companies. Hortigüela presented the AMETIC Digital Agenda 2026-2032, with 218 measures from its 21 commissions to promote competitiveness, technological leadership and well-being. Its goals, aligned with the European Digital Compass 2030, seek for 75% of companies to adopt Cloud, AI and Big Data, 90% of SMEs to achieve basic maturity, and to double high-potential startups. Ignacio Juliá, CEO of Banco Santander Spain, defended channeling European savings towards technology companies to finance long-term projects. According to Juliá, the Digital Decade 2026 report exposes European gaps in connectivity and technology, and the challenge for Spain is to convert digitalization into real productivity for SMEs.
Technology at the service of the citizen
For her part, the mayor of Santander, Gema Igual, claimed the urgency of ‘socializing technology’ so that ‘no one is left behind’. He urged public administrations to collaborate closely with the private sector, encouraging companies to advance, investigate and design new methods to reach citizens. “That is your role, to promote and collaborate,” he emphasized. He also stressed that sensors and analytical data must reflect real improvements in public services, warning about the danger of dehumanization: “We must know how to explain these data, see the immediate benefit and that they do not distance us from citizens.” This governance challenge will be debated in the afternoon in the smart cities forum that she will chair.
Óscar López attends
But, without a doubt, the highlight belonged to Óscar López, Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Service, who this time and unlike previous editions in which he canceled his presence at the last minute, attended the opening of the event. López made a statement about what has been done in the eight years of socialist government, ensuring that technological evolution is “a success story shared between administrations and the private sector”, recalling that one in every three euros of recovery funds has been allocated to digitalizing the country. To continue promoting this growth, the minister has announced the imminent resolution of aid for AI: ‘We will soon resolve the AI calls with an investment of 180 million euros for more than 372 selected projects.’ Seven out of every ten of these projects will be promoted by SMEs in all the Spanish autonomous communities, with aid of between 400,000 and 5 million euros. In addition, the health sector will receive a direct boost of ’50 million euros of public investment to launch 72 AI projects in the field of health’.
The minister took advantage of his presence to present the ‘Atlas of Artificial Intelligence’, a 30-page report presented last week to the Council of Ministers that analyzes the entire AI value chain, from access to raw materials and rare earths to advanced applications. López recalled that the Spanish AI Strategy, underway since 2020 and reinforced in 2024, has already mobilized 1.5 billion euros. Milestones in training stand out with nearly 60 university chairs and the hiring of 334 advanced researchers, the development of the ALIA open language model and the European ban on the generation of false sexual content by AI to protect minors.
Project of the great European gigafactory
Óscar López has also dedicated a substantial part of his speech to computing infrastructures and data centers, defending a sustainable, efficient and sovereign model for Spain. The minister has announced that the Government has authorized the urgent processing of a royal decree that will regulate the requirements of energy, environmental sustainability, resilience and digital sovereignty of future data centers in the country because “we not only want data centers, but we want them to be the best data centers: those that are sustainable, efficient and sovereign.”
Although many entities in the data center industry have criticized the regulations, what they consider from the executive is that this new regulation will prevent what is beginning to happen in other countries, where the construction of data centers is causing citizen protests, to not happen. To defend the benefits of the legislation, López relied on what happened in several nations: «The Netherlands has blocked the sale of state land for these uses. In the United States, a specific rate for data centers has been approved in 23 states. And in Ireland it has had to be regulated when data centers already consumed more than 22% of the country’s electricity consumption. So orderly development is not a brake, but a seal of distinction for the Spanish digital economy,” he said. To top it all off, López has opted for Spain to host one of the first three semiconductor gigafactories in the European Union. This strategic megaproject will mobilize more than 4,000 million euros of investment and will have the participation, among others, of Santander, Telefónica, ACS and the main technology corporations in the country.
The Meeting has also confirmed that artificial intelligence has surpassed its experimental phase to become an engine for massive deployment on an industrial scale. This was stated by Paco Salcedo, president of Microsoft Spain, who presented the case of his company as an example of this consolidated technological maturity, with more than 800,000 AI agents operating internally to provide service to its workforce of more than 200,000 employees. According to data from the Work Trend Index, professional users have matured significantly, directing almost 50% of these AI tools towards advanced reasoning and decision-making tasks. The practical challenges of this competitiveness were analyzed in a round table moderated by Asier González (Banco Santander) and with the participation of Manuel Lobeira (CEO of Acorde), Pablo Pazos (CEO of Barkibu), Nacho Urigüen (CEO of Irontec) and Julio Sola (CEO of GPU Solutions). Finally, the afternoon sessions will delve into the subject through three parallel ‘Connected Ecosystems’ forums, dedicated to discussing data in health, value chains in quantum technologies and the competitiveness of smart cities, chaired by Mayor Gema Igual, consolidating the innovative role of AMETIC in the national technology sector.
