Barcelona, AI factory: Telefónica and Fujitsu will expand the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer
The Catalan and Spanish governments are contributing 60 million of the 129 million for the project, which is co-financed with the EU, Portugal and Türkiye.
BarcelonaTelefónica and Fujitsu will expand the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer to make Barcelona one of the seven artificial intelligence (AI) "factories" planned for the European Union (EU). The project, with an investment of €129 million, was awarded to both companies through a call for proposals launched in July. One of the main objectives of the project, with its €129 million budget, is to facilitate access to these new technologies for SMEs. start-ups and public administrations.
This initiative, awarded to both companies, is co-financed 50% by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the EU's initiative for supercomputing, and by the governments of Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. The Catalan and Spanish governments are contributing €60 million of the total planned amount. The artificial intelligence factory of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) is working to boost its AI capabilities with the expansion of the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer.
The supercomputer expansion aims to boost the AI factory's infrastructure, as approved by the European Commission in December 2024. According to the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the objective is to "democratize access to advanced supercomputing infrastructure, offering computing and storage capacity to SMEs and start-ups throughout Europe, as well as to public administrations, to train AI models and to develop innovative systems using this technology." According to EU estimates, this represents "a step forward in strengthening European supercomputing capabilities," one of the EU's initiatives to gain strategic autonomy, along with others such as promoting chip production. Fujitsu will install two new computing partitions, one for training language models (LLMs) – which are deep learning models (deep learning) very large ones that are pre-trained with large amounts of data – and another to apply them (inference); an improvement of storage capabilities with a new high-performance file system for AI and new technologies, and a suite of specialized software.
The machine, to be installed during the first half of 2026, will utilize two interconnected spaces within the BSC-CNS – the BSC headquarters data center, the same as MareNostrum 5, and the Torre Girona chapel – and will feature technologies from Supermicro (hardware), IBM (storage and software), and VAST (storage). With AI factories, EuroHPC and the BSC-CNS are boosting Europe's AI supercomputing capabilities and facilitating the adoption and use of these technologies by industry. The main focus is on SMEs. start-ups and the public administration of the countries participating in the AI factory network.
Spain, along with Germany and Poland, is one of only three European countries with two of these infrastructures, following the recent approval by the European Commission of a second factory at the Galician Supercomputing Center (CESGA).