Noticias
The BSC AI Factory drives its growth and expands to Pier07 at Tech Barcelona
- The European AI factory led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre is promoting a new innovation environment that will enable the development of new Artificial Intelligence applications with direct access to computational resources, support services and a dynamic ecosystem.
- The space will host innovation experts and researchers from the BSC and will offer a working environment for users of the BSC AI Factory, who will coexist with other start-ups, corporations and investors from Barcelona’s innovation ecosystem.
Barcelona, 25 September 2025. – The BSC AI Factory, the European artificial intelligence factory led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre – National Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS), is expanding to Pier07 at Tech Barcelona, promoting a new environment for innovation and connection between scientific research and the business community in the field of artificial intelligence.
The initiative enables entrepreneurs and researchers to develop and deploy future AI projects aligned with Europe’s technological priorities, offering direct access to the BSC’s AI computing infrastructure, expert support services, training programmes and the innovation ecosystem promoted by the Tech Barcelona association.
Initially, the BSC AI Factory has 1,000 m2, 100 workstations and four meeting rooms at Pier07, Tech Barcelona’s Life Sciences hub located on Via Laietana in Barcelona. In the form of a coworking and incubation area, the space will feature innovation experts from the BSC and will offer a working environment for users of the BSC’s AI factory, who will share the same building with other startups, corporations and investors from Barcelona’s innovation ecosystem, as well as research staff from the BSC itself. The format has been designed to be exportable to the other member states of the BSC AI Factory – Portugal, Turkey and Romania – with the aim of maximising the territorial impact of the project.
For Cristian Canton, associate director of the BSC, ‘the connection with Pier07 is a major step forward in the BSC’s strategy to bring the infrastructure and knowledge generated at the centre closer to the local, regional, national and European business community’. He adds: ‘The BSC AI Factory will offer advanced supercomputing resources to start-ups, SMEs and institutions, with the aim of accelerating the development of AI applications aligned with European values.’
For Miquel Martí, CEO of Tech Barcelona, the arrival of the BSC AI Factory at Pier07 ‘brings the scientific and computational capacity of the BSC closer to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, which should help us to develop technology-based companies that guarantee Europe’s technological sovereignty’. In this context, he highlights that ‘Barcelona is establishing itself as a European benchmark in attracting initiatives of this type, consolidating our ecosystem as one of the main drivers of innovation on the continent’.
Pier07, the hub that connects scientific talent with the business world
The decision to establish the BSC AI Factory’s workspace at Pier07 is due to its strategic location in the heart of the city, with access to a leading collaborative environment in technology, research and entrepreneurship.
Opened in 2023 in partnership with the Núñez i Navarro group, Tech Barcelona’s Life Sciences hub brings together researchers, start-ups, spin-offs, investors, corporations and public institutions. The building, located at Via Laietana 26 in Barcelona, is part of the association’s Urban Tech Campus project, a network of connected spaces – Pier01, Pier03 and Pier07 – designed to integrate innovation and technology into the city.
At the same time, it is located in the vicinity of the Ciutadella del Coneixement (City of Knowledge), a project that aims to turn Ciutadella Park and its surroundings into a leading European hub for knowledge, dissemination, research and innovation.
Tech Barcelona, as a whole, represents more than 1,500 companies in the city’s technological and digital ecosystem and has the support of 110 organisations, leaders in their sectors, committed to the project.
The AI factory in Barcelona
The BSC AI Factory is one of 13 AI factories promoted by the European Commission and the EuroHPC JU to place Europe at the forefront of global AI development and deployment. Powered by the next-generation supercomputing capabilities of MareNostrum 5, including its AI-optimised partition, this initiative will accelerate AI innovation in Europe’s most critical economic sectors, while strengthening the continent’s technological sovereignty.
Its launch in Barcelona involves a total investment of around €198 million, most of which will be used to improve the capabilities of MareNostrum 5 so that it can train and develop large-scale generative AI models for diverse fields such as health, finance, administration, energy and communication. The BSC AI Factory will offer access to advanced supercomputing resources tailored to AI start-ups, industrial companies, research centres and European scientific projects. This access is organised in different ways, depending on the level of experience and technical needs of each user.
Specifically, free access is offered to SMEs and start-ups through three modalities: Playground, for beginners who want to do their first tests; Fast Lane, for users with HPC experience who need up to 50,000 GPU hours; and Large Scale, for training large-scale AI models that require more than 50,000 GPU hours.
