A new step towards Catalonia having a chip development and prototyping center. The Catalan government has awarded the contract for drafting the basic engineering project for the construction of Innofab, a project resulting from collaboration between the Spanish and Catalan governments, to the IDP group, part of Bureau Veritas, for €2.6 million. The proposal, which must be submitted in April 2026, will be the starting point for developing the detailed engineering design and the subsequent construction project, which is expected to be awarded in the summer of 2026. Innofab will be Catalonia's leading chip center and will be located in the Parc de l'Alba, in close collaboration with the synchrotron, in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Vallès. It will represent an investment of €400 million, part of which will be financed with resources from the Next Generation EU funds. It falls within the framework of the PERTE (strategic project) for the chip and the European Chips Act. These are two European initiatives that seek to strengthen European technological autonomy, one of Brussels' priorities.

There's a crossover between technology, science, and artificial intelligence that could revolutionize medicine, research, and other things we probably can't even imagine today. One of the people most familiar with this intersection is Josep Maria Martorell. He has been Director General of Research, Associate Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and for months has been a partner at the investment firm Invivo Partners, where he focuses on investing in artificial intelligence projects.

Chipmaker AMD and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, have announced a six-gigawatt deal to power OpenAI’s next-generation artificial intelligence infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct graphics processing units (GPUs). The first deployment, of a 1-gigawatt AMD Instinct MI450 GPU, is planned to begin in the second half of 2026. Under the agreement, Open AI could eventually own up to 10% of AMD, Nvidia’s primary competitor, with whom it also recently finalized a deal.

No sooner said than done. The US government has agreed to buy a 10% stake in Intel. This initiative, a level not seen in the private sector since the 2008 crisis, will inject $8.9 billion (around €7.6 billion) into the chip giant, as part of Donald Trump's strategy to boost the US semiconductor industry.

The steps toward launching the first chip design, development, and prototyping center in Catalonia are accelerating. The Generalitat (Catalan government) plans to approve this Tuesday the creation of the public foundation InnoFAB, with the purpose of promoting specialized research and development in technology and pre-production of chips based on advanced semiconductors, which have strategic applications in sectors ranging from electronics to healthcare and energy.

Last week, Donald Trump traveled to the Middle East and made headlines. The American president met with the new Syrian president Ahmed al Sharaa, after years of sanctions in Damascus. In a turn against Washington hawks, Trump also said he was open to negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. will have an equally important impact on future geopolitics.

Catalan companies have secured €27.65 million of the €53.2 million in funding from the PERTE Xip call for proposals, which finances semiconductor projects, according to calculations made by ACCIÓ, the competitiveness agency of the Department of Business and Employment. This represents 52% of the subsidies allocated by the Ministry of Industry and Tourism for the microelectronics industry in Spain.

The time of the covid was also the time in which a new dictionary filled with words like was forged in the popular imagination pandemic, coronavirus, masks and even, chips and semiconductorsThe shortage of microelectronic components, such as these chips, suddenly became a global and local problem. Society then learned that these components were essential to keep the economy moving forward, and alarm bells started ringing. This is where the story of Openchip, commonly known as the Catalan Nvidia (and European), although its managers don't quite like this definition.

Just a few days afterfree various technological products from tariffs, including computers and smartphones, Donald Trump said Sunday that tariffs on semiconductors and chips will be implemented "in the near future." "Just as we did with [the tariffs on] steel, autos, and aluminum, which are already in full effect, we'll be doing the same thing with semiconductors, chips, and many more products," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

The infrastructure needed for the future development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems was the focus of Nvidia's GTC 2025 developer conference last week. The company, main driver of the global enthusiasm around AI, defends the need for a much more powerful data processing infrastructure than the current one. Critics of this highly technological vision, on the other hand, consider it preferable to manufacture less ambitious and cheaper chips and inference models that would create a demand for useful, reliable, and profitable AI services for both users and providers.

The temporary layoff plan (ERTE) that Seat will implement as of September 27 due to the lack of semiconductors will affect a minimum of 482 workers and a maximum of 1,276 daily, depending on the supply of these materials. These are the numbers that have been agreed by the management and the unions in the negotiation of the ERTE, the second at the car manufacturer to address the lack of microchips. It will last, in principle, until June 30, 2022, as reported by Seat sources.