Spain Announces $155 Million AI Subsidy Plan to Drive Innovation

Spanish president Pedro Sánchez announced this Monday that the government will invest 150 million euros—around $155 million— in a subsidiary program to help Spanish companies enhance and integrate artificial intelligence. Sánchez also introduced a Spanish open-source AI model called Alia.

According to La Vanguardia, Sánchez explained that the government is committed to supporting companies in the development of new technologies, including small and medium-sized enterprises.

“Of these (the 150 million euros), we will soon allocate 20 million to 500 use cases in small and medium-sized enterprises, whose results and experiences will be accessible to our entire network of SMEs, helping to make them a more innovative and competitive ecosystem,” said Sánchez during the HispanIA 2040 event yesterday.

The Spanish president also introduced the new Spanish AI model called Alia, an open-source model trained in Castilian and the co-official languages Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Valencian, spoken in multiple regions in Spain.

According to El País, Alia’s goal is to better understand Spanish context, dialects, expressions, and culture than popular models like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini, which are usually trained in English. Sánchez also announced that the government is already testing the model in two pilot projects: one with the Tax Agency to accelerate bureaucratic processes and another with the Primary Care service to improve early diagnosis of heart failure.

As a government, Spain’s initiative stands out in the region with its focus on linguistic diversity and open-source accessibility.

Other powerful open-source models have also been released recently. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek launched its latest open-source AI model, DeepSeek-V3, a few days ago, and Alibaba unveiled its Qwen 2.5 open-source models a few months ago.