Talent Arena will bring experts from Google, Mistral and Hugging Face to Barcelona

BarcelonaTalent Arena, the event dedicated to digital talent that is held within the framework of the Mobile World Congress, will return to Barcelona for its third edition with the presence of companies of the scale of Google, Mistral, or the open AI platform Hugging Face. This was announced this Thursday by the Mobile World Capital foundation, the organizer of the event.

After intense growth between the first and second editions, which brought more than 25,000 people to the Montjuïc venue of Fira de Barcelona, the general director of MWCapital, Laia Corbella, has celebrated the event as a "competitiveness factor for Barcelona". "Talent Arena reinforces the city's capacity to generate, retain, and attract talent," she added.

Big names at the MWC

Among the most prominent speakers who will gather at the Fira de Barcelona Montjuïc venue between March 1st and 3rd of next year are Sergio Boixo, the Spanish engineer who serves as the head of quantum computing at Google; Ken Kutaragi, the creator of the PlayStation video game console; Irene Solaiman, the global policy director at Hugging Face, or Patrick von Platen, a researcher at the French artificial intelligence giant Mistral. There will also be presentations by Edwin Catmull, co-founder of the digital animation benchmark Pixar; by Daniela Rus, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT, or by Radia Perlman, the American engineer known as "the mother of the internet".

In addition to the influx of speakers, technology companies will be present at the congress such as the Catalan company Openchip; ASML, the largest company in Europe, responsible for manufacturing the photolithography machines essential for making microchips, or Multiverse Computing, a Basque AI and quantum computing company that recently raised a 500 million euro funding round.

After intense growth in the second edition, Corbella believes that the Talent Arena has confirmed that there is "a community of IT professionals looking to generate knowledge". "And this is where we will focus," announced the executive. The event, in this sense, will seek to stimulate the connection of technological talent at all levels – young people and students, but also experienced profiles – with a business fabric that seeks to "anticipate the needs they will have" in the future.

The future of the industry

In this sense, Sianne Ryder, executive director of events and industry services at GSMA Ltd., has focused her objectives on "helping the industry identify the skills gaps" they still suffer from. "The future of the industry will not only depend on the technologies we create, but also on having the people and the skills to make them work," she stated.

In addition to the presentations, Talent Arena will offer its attendees various working sessions, as well as hackathons (hacking marathons), to develop applications on the premises. Although the organization has not made a specific forecast of visitors, Corbella has ensured that "the success of past editions guarantees a similar attendance" to that of 2026. "This year we are focusing on offering the highest quality to attendees," the general director insisted. The sessions will once again occupy the entire Hall 8 of Montjuïc, with about 14,000 square meters of exhibition space. The presentation event was attended by the fourth deputy mayor of Barcelona, Jordi Valls, as well as the secretary of digital policies of the Generalitat, Maria Galindo. Neither of them, however, spoke, in the midst of institutional mourning for the train accident in Toledo.