Nvidia, the maker of graphics memory chips that has dominated artificial intelligence in recent years, continues to push the market to grow at a forced pace. As announced in a statement, the most valuable company on the planet has reached an agreement with six of Wall Street's largest financial entities to mobilize $500 billion in investment dedicated to AI infrastructure. In a social media post, its CEO, Jensen Huang, assured that the alliance's objective is to "establish independent financing platforms" to activate the necessary capital to build and launch large-scale AI factories.

Earthquake at the helm of Google's artificial intelligence segment. The former CEO of DeepMind, Nobel laureate in chemistry Demis Hassabis, has stepped down from leading the British subsidiary to take charge of leading Alphabet's – the parent company of the well-known internet search engine – long-term scientific research. Hassabis relinquishes executive functions at DeepMind, Mountain View's first major bet on AI, but assumes its presidency. In a corporate statement, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that the move aims to "accelerate the work done and maintain focus on the frontier of artificial intelligence".

Ten universities in the State, including the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), have created ConfIA, a network with the aim of establishing coordinated artificial intelligence development aligned with the new European regulation. As explained by Ulises Cortés, professor of AI at UPC, researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and president of this network, the main factor that has driven its creation has been the entry into force of the new phase of the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act, the EU AI Act, on August 2nd.

Cristian Fàbrega Gallego is a professor in the Department of Electronic and Biomedical Engineering and coordinates the master's degree in renewable energies and energy sustainability at the University of Barcelona. He speaks to ARA to explain the environmental impact and energy consumption of artificial intelligence data centers, which are multiplying around the world.

Long before chatbots entered our lives, we already had too much judgment and lacked listening. Perhaps that's why we find it so seductive to converse with technology that never interrupts us, never questions us, and almost always agrees with us. The paradox is that we run the risk of confusing validation with listening and elevating this experience to a new thermometer for our relationships.

Throughout history, humanity has had only one system for asking and answering questions: other humans. When we wanted to know something, we asked the doctor, the teacher, or the neighbor who knew; we read the newspaper, which paid journalists to investigate; we consulted books, magazines or websites written by experts. This human question-and-answer system worked the way it worked: it was slow, imperfect, and unequal. But it had an architecture of incentives that, for better or worse, sustained the production of knowledge. Producers of information (newspapers, magazines, researchers, creators) invested time and resources in generating quality content.

An artificial intelligence model from OpenAI, the North American multinational creator of ChatGPT, caused an "unprecedented incident" in global cybersecurity. As the company acknowledged in a statement, one of its training models broke free from its limitations and attacked Hugging Face, a company also dedicated to AI.

The Government will approve this Tuesday at the executive council meeting to allocate fourteen million euros for the deployment in Barcelona of one of the first European artificial intelligence factories. It is the BSC AI Factory project, an artificial intelligence infrastructure driven by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSCCNS).

In mid-June, United States President Donald Trump issued an order that seemed unthinkable: after weeks of tensions with Anthropic, the company that created the artificial intelligence model Claude, the Oval Office forced them to close their most advanced tools, Mythos and Fable, to any user who was not North American. Although the blockade has already been resolved, experts and markets are still trembling: Trump then demonstrated that he has his finger on the "on and off switch" for global technologies, comments Miquel Martí, executive director of Tech Barcelona. The temporary detention at Anthropic was irrefutable proof of the evidence that Europe, like so many other international players, does not control its digital and technological future, nor its present.

I receive a professor who comes to get to know the university. We share research projects and internationalization opportunities. We communicate in English, the language we have in common. Her English level is low, according to her; mine, not. We understand each other because we listen to each other, also, with our eyes: we unconsciously use non-verbal strategies; when she can't find the word she's looking for, between the two of us we find synonyms that don't quite fit, but the nuances help us to understand each other. The communicative act is calm, fun, almost playful. She relaxes and lets herself go linguistically, experiments with English, makes mistakes that do not impede communication, we exchange experiences and desires that require a high level of language that she does not have, but she feels comfortable. Between the two of us, we create a calm space for language, for multilingual well-being, so that the meeting is effective.We say goodbye.

The CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Demis Hassabis, has warned that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive "in three or four years," urging "urgent measures" to ensure this technology is developed safely.

“Tito has died,” says one of the ladies who – it’s very funny to watch – are playing bridge in this pastry shop, half elegant, half decadent, the kind that has cold breaded meat sandwiches, wrapped up, and those little triangle-shaped sandwiches, the kind that the protagonists of The Importance of Being Earnest.

The technology industry has become one of the central pillars of the Catalan economy. The economic figures of the ICT sector (information and communication technologies) have grown non-stop in the last decade, according to the 18 editions of the annual barometer published by the Technological Circle of Catalonia. The latest edition records an unprecedented business record: in 2025, technology companies in the Principality exceeded 30.6 billion euros in revenue. This is an increase of 13% compared to 2024, when the previous ceiling was also broken with more than 28 billion euros in income. Last year's total is equivalent to 9.1% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), half a point more than the previous year.

Catalonia continues to expand its computing capacity to tackle the advance of artificial intelligence. The company Submer Group, based in Barcelona, will invest more than 1 billion euros to install a new data center in Flix (Ribera d'Ebre). The technological infrastructure will be located on the grounds of the former Ercros chemical plant. The center, as the company assured in a statement, will be "sustainable and state-of-the-art," and will dedicate its activity to boosting investment in AI-based applications and services.

What do Leo XIV, Donald Trump, and Xi Jinping have in common? That all three have understood that the emergence of artificial intelligence is no longer just a technological issue, but a global strategic fact. The Holy Father opens his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas warning that humanity faces a “decisive choice”, and closes it with a fundamental question: how can we care for the human person in the age of AI? Trump, in turn, presented the American plan a year ago to “win the race” for artificial intelligence, convinced that whoever dominates this ecosystem will set global standards and reap the economic and military benefits. Xi Jinping, with more measured but no less ambitious language, has also placed AI at the center of China's coming years, to the point of wanting to introduce it massively into industrial processes and move towards artificial general intelligence.And meanwhile, what are we doing in Europe? Not much, to be honest. Facing a continent scorched by climate change, with an uncaring, nationalist and anti-European right gaining ground, and with a war entrenched in the backyard, the European Union appears slow, hesitant and, too often, inefficient. The problem is not just that we struggle to react to AI; it's that AI arrives at a time when the whole old world order seems to be falling apart at the same time. Therefore, the discussion about algorithms, data and machines is also a discussion about power, dependence and political future.It is worth reading the papal encyclical not as a text strictly about technology, but as a warning about the course of a planet that is more insecure, more unpredictable, and more multipolar than what the men and women of my generation have known. We are witnessing —first with condescension; then with disbelief, and now with stupefaction— the undoing of an order that seemed more solid to us than it was.Trump has called into question institutions and alliances that we believed unassailable: the United Nations, NATO, free trade, even the very idea of the West. Today, Europeans are no longer entirely sure whether the United States is a reliable ally or not. And this is perhaps its hardest lesson: in international politics, what was white yesterday can be black today, and beneath the civilized veneer of institutions, the old law of the strongest continues to beat.

Although we may not like to admit it, artificial intelligence has practically blown up our educational system in secondary school, high school, and university. The digital world had already impacted us greatly, both in the fact that the use of the internet could –and did– replace the process of searching, learning, and constructing when doing assignments, as well as in attention span and the value of the classroom as a space for training and creation: with virtual classrooms, we had moved to providing them with everything. The world at their fingertips, students believed, and they understood that the era of work and effort was over. Wikipedia, or El Rincón del Vago, became the repositories for the content that appeared in all assignments. Bibliographic resources were no longer needed, and reading even less so. Psychopedagogues, always so attentive to new technologies, considered that there was no problem, that it was a matter of changing methodologies and that, if we knew how to do it, technological resources would work in our favor. They said it was necessary to prioritize the digital skills of young people and not worry about them incorporating knowledge and understanding, but rather skills and competencies. Classrooms became playful spaces where computers and mobile phones were used –learning environments, they called them–, while reading and writing were abandoned, attention span was lost, and the teacher became a mere facilitator. Ignorance and disengagement from learning progressed appropriately, with boys and girls becoming increasingly unmotivated, incapable of effort and work, overprotected, narcissistic, and with neurolearning and mental health problems becoming apparent.For a little over a year now, AI has landed with all the destructive capacity it possesses in the face of the educational system. In assignments, there is not even the work of cutting and pasting. It does it for you directly and completely. It grounds, structures, and writes until it looks like a good job. In general, it is not yet entirely so. It makes intern mistakes: it invents bibliographic references and creates graphs for you, sometimes surreal ones. Since it is a technology that learns, it gets better and better, and with a superficial reading, obvious errors are corrected. And since its formal perfection can raise suspicions about authorship, you can ask it to introduce human errors to make it believable. If, as a professor, you read a product that you know your student did not write with any seriousness, you soon find the mechanical character in the writing, the lack of soul. We have no defense possible against this irruption which does nothing but substitute work, relegating the student who uses this facilitator tool. Again, techno-optimists claim that we must integrate it, help disciples use it, they say, appropriately and responsibly. Also that this is the future and that it "has come to stay." Of this last part, I am sure, but if we bet on technologies and methodologies that replace us – and I'm not talking about jobs, although that too – that eliminate any effort, what is fundamental in learning disappears, which is the process. Without the journey, there is no achievement of knowledge nor the value of experience. It is the annihilation of human knowledge and the loss by individuals of their singularity linked to culture and knowledge; soulless individuals.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has urged the main financial institutions in the euro area to present "by October 31, 2026" a comprehensive action plan with concrete measures to address cybersecurity threats related to cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as Mythos, developed by Anthropic.

Europe is experiencing a moment that does not allow for inertia. Artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and data are already part of the major decisions of our time, as they determine how we produce, how we research, how we provide public services, and how we decide with our own voice. Europe must choose whether to reinvent itself while maintaining its values – democracy, rights, humanism, and social cohesion – or whether to accept that other powers will set the rules for the future.

We are ending the academic year with the feeling of stepping on ground that has disappeared. What is the value of learning when you can generate an essay that sounds good in thirty seconds? Next year, we cannot limit ourselves to updating content. Brave changes are needed, at the height of the challenges posed by the omnipresence of generative AI in students' lives.

ThUS artificial intelligence models, which have comfortably dominated the market since the launch of ChatGPT, no longer seem so unattainable. In mid-June, the start-up Chinese Z.ai, a Tsinghua University spin-off that has been at the forefront of Beijing's technological strategy, has released its latest product, GLM-5.2. The analysis published by the company itself places it at a similar level to the main products of OpenAI and Anthropic laboratories. Market analysts have confirmed its potential; the cybersecurity company Semgrep, for example, has stated: "We have another Mythos at home." Experts consulted by ARA acknowledge that a general independent valuation is needed, but indicate that, based on the published specifications, GLM-5.2 would be "no more than 1% below" American competition.