The fabric of technology companies in Catalonia continues to expand. According to a report prepared by Acció, the agency for business growth of the Department of Business and Labor of the Generalitat, the Principality had 402 deep technology startups at the close of 2025. This is the first time that more than 400 businesses of this profile have been registered in the country. The figure represents a growth of 7.5% compared to the previous year.

Binance, the world's leading cryptocurrency exchange platform, has suffered a cyberattack with an estimated impact of 6.3 billion dollars (about 5.4 billion euros). The company reported this Friday that it has managed to block about 3 billion of the affected assets and that it has temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while it investigates the unauthorized operations.

Talent Arena, the event dedicated to digital talent held within the framework of the Mobile World Congress, will return to Barcelona for its third edition with the presence of companies on 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 sessions.

The Spanish government is determined to approve the decree regulating the requirements for energy, environmental, and resilience sustainability and digital sovereignty for data processing centers (DPCs) in Spain before the general elections on November 29th, even though the deadline is very tight. In this way, it has submitted a new text to the Council of State after studying more than 600 allegations during the public hearing period, as well as the mandatory report from the National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) in which it was pointed out that the government's initial energy and renewable requirements were too "strict".

For years, relaunching the industry has been one of the great priorities in Catalonia. With the eternal promise that the sector must reach 25% of the gross domestic product (GDP, the indicator that measures the volume of an economy), the Government sealed a major pact with employers' associations and unions at the beginning of the summer to strengthen the weight of industry within the economy, which since the great financial crisis of 2008 has remained at around 17%. And in a context in which dual-use technologies –for civil and military use– are becoming increasingly relevant in the face of the Russian threat, this activity can become key to the country's growth and prosperity.

A market that reached 2 billion dollars in July now exceeds 9 billion dollars. It is that of credit default swaps (CDS) linked to debt issued by the main technology companies tied to artificial intelligence (AI). These are financial derivatives that became popular during the 2008 financial crisis and which, in essence, allow for protection against possible defaults by bond issuers. They are bets against a possible downturn with the risk of losing money if the trend turns around.

Catalonia retains the throne of technology transfer through companies in the State. This is revealed by the third edition of the report on the ecosystem of spin-offs of deep technologies in Spain, published this Thursday by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona foundation. The document detects up to 1,014 spin-off companies –that is, businesses created from scientific research in research centers, universities and other institutions– active in the Spanish fabric at the close of 2025; a year-on-year increase of 4.6%. Of these, 290 are Catalan, 28.5% of the entire ecosystem, and they generate 2,885 highly specialized jobs.

We cannot let ourselves be carried away by environmental pessimism. All around us there are many people who work, who research, who transform. Many people who think and act in the service of others. Bringing this committed talent to the surface, giving it a voice and visibility, is a duty of the media that we at ARA take seriously. Of course, we must also explain what does not work, denounce corruption and injustices, and hold those in power accountable. We do this day after day. But the talent we have here at home, in universities, in research centers, in companies, which too often remains hidden, interests us just as much or more. It is a talent that acts in many fields: science, the humanities and the arts, medicine, gastronomy, sports... And also in technology, in a very relevant and transversal way, and often affecting and dialoguing with all other fields.

It is May 7, 1959, and a tall, burly man with little hair on his head walks decisively into the Senate House, an 18th-century neoclassical building. This is Charles Percy Snow, a chemist, successful novelist, and advisor to the British government, recently named Baron of Leicester by the Queen for his services to the country. He is preparing to give the Rede Lecture, a prestigious conference held every year at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He does not know it yet, but he is about to create a considerable stir that will awaken the wrath of many powerful people and generate a public debate that will last for years.

Barcelona comes close to hosting the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), the world's leading space congress, in 2029. The Barcelona bid was not selected by the organization to host the event, which will ultimately go to Geneva. It should be remembered that the Catalan capital was competing with the Swiss city and Houston to be the host of the event organized by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). The decision was made this very Friday in Antalya, where this year's edition of the IAC is being held.

Artificial intelligence (AI) affects the entire value chain of banking, and the impact is "brutal". This was stated by the director of the Department of Experimentation and Laboratory of Applied Technologies (Delta) of the Bank of Spain, which is headquartered in Barcelona. During a breakfast organized by the executive organization CEDE at the headquarters of Foment del Treball, he assured that all financial institutions are incorporating this technology, from personnel management and more basic activities to business processes, ranging from credit to risk and monetary policy. The main entities, such as BBVA, CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell, have reinforced this commitment in recent times.

Factorial, the Catalan company specializing in business management software, which ranks among the scale-ups most valuable in Europe, has completed its leap into artificial intelligence with the launch of One, an AI agent for companies dedicated to "connecting information and automating work".

"Let no one have to choose between blind enthusiasm and fear." That is the goal of the Spanish government when it defends the need to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), especially at a time when the abrupt entry into an era marked by this technology is being questioned. The First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, summarized it this way this Monday, before the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, presented from Moncloa IA360. Plan for a responsible deployment of AI. It is a strategy aimed at regulating and promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence that the Spanish government wants to roll out over the next 12 months. The intention is to make the leap from being the "seventh world power in AI dynamism to the fifth power".

More than a dozen prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers warned last week that the technology companies in the sector are building is becoming a risk to humanity. The problem, these researchers asserted, is that companies are not good at controlling the systems, no matter how hard they try. Following revelations that so-called OpenAI AI agents escaped from their testing system and hacked another company's computers, new alarms raised within the AI research world have accentuated fears that, for years, companies have prioritized development speed and money over safety.

The headquarters of Foment del Treball has been filled with proclamations in defense of Barcelona, Catalonia, and Europe not missing the train of artificial intelligence (AI), in the face of the flood of alerts and fear that has shaken the world in recent hours. The representative of the European Commission in Spain, Daniel Calleja, has clearly positioned himself in favor: "We must invest more and better in AI. Barcelona has a great opportunity, and so does Spain," he claimed this Tuesday at a congress organized by the Catalan employers' association.

All activities in life are subject to norms or rules. It is one of the characteristics of civilized societies. It is evident that advances, as happened back in the day with the internet, begin by breaking some ways of doing or working, but over time they become normalized, although there are always those who find a way to go down the path of illegality or know how to take advantage of the lack of rules. We must be careful to reduce this aspect as much as possible.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has called on states and companies to govern artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that offers many benefits to society but which, in his view, also puts human rights at risk. "All human rights are at risk," he asserted.

In recent days, even the main representatives of artificial intelligence (AI), from Open AI to Anthropic, Space X or Google, have warned about the risks of a technology that, they warn, may end up dominating humans. "There is a genuine concern about the models that are becoming common and have not been tested much and can be used to commit atrocities," states Esteve Almirall, Esade professor specializing in data, analytics, technology and AI. In this context, once Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT, has decided to delay its stock market launch to take a kind of pause in growth, some see the fear of a stratospheric punishment in the market if any of the existing tools is involved in some wrongdoing. Some of these companies have valuations that exceed the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries like Germany (more than five trillion) and a negative reaction would mean an almost unprecedented collapse given that there have never been companies with these prices, warns Josep Soler, founder and executive advisor of EFPA Spain (Spanish Association of Financial Advisors and Planners). "The enormous valuations that have been made of these companies would collapse in the event that trust in them was lost," he adds.

The conversation about artificial intelligence has focused mostly on the product. ChatGPT (OpenAI) or Claude (Anthropic) have become ubiquitous on users' devices; and, with them, in the social conversation. Like all technological disruptions of the scale that is assumed for AI, however, widespread adoption is the key to any significant advance. This adoption is among the fields of study of Marta Serra-Garcia, a Catalan economist and professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School of Management at the University of California - San Diego specialized in behavioral economics, who has studied public trust in AI. Serra-Garcia receives ARA at the Ciutadella campus of the Pompeu Fabra University, where she studied and where she has returned to participate in the European Meeting of the Economic Science Association, organized by the center's department of economics.

The Minister of Business and Labour, Miquel Sàmper, stated in a recent meeting with Catalan representatives of the quantum industry that Catalonia "is arriving in time to lead" what is set to be the next technological revolution. Among the fifty companies that, according to Acció, are dedicated to this technology in the Principality, Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech stands out with its own light: the company, which has developed the three quantum computers for the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is one of the leaders in European quantum computing, an economic field in surprising growth. Its CEO, Marta P. Estarellas, receives Companies at the company's headquarters to talk about a technology that "is a bit scary" and is "not very intuitive" for the general public, but whose applications will be unique and will stand out in the country's future.