Carme Artigas: "Spain has 8 billion available for technological start-ups"

Artigas, who has announced that he will leave this Friday his position in the Ministry of Digital Transformation directed by José Luis Escrivá, explained during the Expansión IA event, on Artificial Intelligence that EXPANSIÓN is developing, that Spain has the Next Tech fund "endowed with 4,000 million public euros that are expanded with another 4,000 million of private money, which means a total of 8,000 million in Spain available to invest in deep tech companies."

Artigas has urged technology-based companies to contact the ICO to request these funds, because, in addition, Spain has the opportunity to develop these technologies in the Spanish language, with 600 million speakers, which "is a unique potential market."

For Artigas, the availability of public money is not the main bottleneck, but it is also necessary that "there are people, initiatives and talent and that companies mobilize", since the companies that are emerging in other countries such as France or Germany "isn't even five months old, so the opportunity hasn't been lost yet."

Furthermore, Artigas has pointed out that another problem for the development of artificial intelligence companies is access to computing, technical resources and chips, of which there is a shortage. Therefore, to help European companies, "the EU is going to release all of Europe's high performance computing capacity, such as the equipment we have in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which will be available for the Academy and for start-ups. ".