Project after project, announcement after announcement, Barcelona keeps building — steadily and consistently — an artificial intelligence ecosystem that has grown well beyond startups, bringing together talent, companies and projects of international scope. Like a snowball effect, the major projects that arrived in 2025 have been joined by new developments in 2026: British multinational Sage has opened a global hub in 22@; Tolemy Bio has chosen Barcelona to develop AI solutions for advanced therapies, and ANYbotics has opened its new engineering and AI hub at DFactory Barcelona, the company's third global site after Zurich and San Francisco.
And the list, in truth, is much longer. Barcelona is a magnet for this kind of project. In fact, for the second year running, the city ranks third in the world for foreign AI investment projects attracted over the past five years, behind only London and Singapore, and it is the leading city in the European Union.
The Global Location Trends report, produced by IBM Consulting through its Plant Location International unit in collaboration with Moody's, places Barcelona among the cities best placed to capitalise on the AI boom to attract new business projects, particularly in technology, research and development. This is not necessarily about adding more millions of euros in investment, but about counting the decisions of international companies to create or expand activity in a given location: new hubs, R&D centres, specialised offices and other business projects.
Behind this power of attraction lies an ecosystem that ACCIÓ, Catalonia's trade and investment agency, put at around 500 companies in 2024 — AI-focused firms generating turnover of more than €2.155 billion and employing some 14,500 people. The study highlighted the sector's acceleration in particular: in four years, the number of companies had almost tripled.
So, in an ecosystem evolving this fast, 2024 figures can hardly capture the full picture today. But another source, using a different methodology, brings us a little closer: the Crunchbase database currently counts 658 AI-related organisations headquartered in Barcelona. The two figures aren't directly comparable — ACCIÓ and Crunchbase use different criteria and methodologies — but together they help gauge the scale of the Barcelona ecosystem.
And as AI grows as a sector, it is also spreading across the wider business fabric. ACCIÓ revealed the figures this past July, at Exponential Day 2026 in Barcelona: in 2025, 30.4% of Catalan companies with more than nine employees had invested in AI-related technologies, including generative AI. That is six points more than a year earlier and more than double the 12.6% recorded in 2023.
AI specialists earn an average annual salary of €59,500
Indeed, Adobe's AI City Index ranks Barcelona as the best-adapted city to AI in Spain, with a score of 94.24 out of 100, ahead of Madrid (89.29) and Valencia (70.66). It draws on a range of indicators, among them the labour market, including the number of AI-related job postings. Barcelona records 93.39 AI-related job postings per million inhabitants, the highest figure in the study. It also achieves the maximum score — 50 out of 50 — on the index of AI-related occupations.
The city has now topped 1,000 AI-related job postings for the first time and currently counts more than 1,200 specialists in the field. The figures come from Mobile World Capital Barcelona's latest Digital Talent Overview, which also shows that AI roles are among the best paid in the sector: AI specialists earn an average annual salary of €59,500, second only to cybersecurity professionals.
All told, Barcelona now has 135,890 digital professionals, 4.85% more than in 2024, and this talent accounts for 6.5% of the city's employment. But Barcelona's digital talent has plenty more figures to offer. And that, we'll save for another Barcelona in Numbers, another Monday.
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