Project after project, announcement after announcement, Barcelona continues to grow – with rhythm and constancy – an artificial intelligence ecosystem that already goes far beyond startups and concentrates talent, companies, and projects of international scope. With a 'snowball' effect, new movements have been added to the large projects that arrived in 2025 during this 2026: the British multinational Sage has inaugurated a global hub in 22@; Tolemy Bio has chosen Barcelona to develop AI solutions applied to advanced therapies, and ANYbotics has opened its new engineering and AI hub at DFactory Barcelona, the company's third global headquarters, after Zurich and San Francisco.
And the list, in reality, is much longer. Barcelona is a pole of attraction for this type of project. In fact, for the second consecutive year, the city occupies the third global position in the number of foreign investment projects in artificial intelligence captured during the last five years, only behind London and Singapore, and is the first city in the European Union.
The report Global Location Trends, prepared by IBM Consulting through its Plant Location International unit, in collaboration with Moody’s, places Barcelona among the cities that are best taking advantage of the rise of artificial intelligence to attract new business projects, especially in activities related to technology, research, and development. It is not necessarily about adding more millions of euros in investment, but about counting decisions by international companies to create or expand activity in a specific location: new hubs, R&D centers, specialized offices, or other business projects.
Behind this attraction capacity there is an ecosystem that ACCIÓ estimated in 2024 at nearly 500 companies in Catalonia. Companies dedicated to artificial intelligence that generated a business volume exceeding 2,155 million euros and employed about 14,500 people. The study especially highlighted the acceleration of the sector: in four years, the number of companies had almost tripled.
Therefore, in such a rapidly evolving ecosystem, 2024 figures can hardly tell the whole current story. But another source, with a different methodology, allows us to get a little closer: the Crunchbase database currently counts 658 organizations linked to artificial intelligence based in Barcelona. The two figures are not directly comparable —ACCIÓ and Crunchbase use different criteria and methodologies—, but both help to size the bulk that the Barcelona ecosystem has reached.
And as AI grows as a sector, it also spreads throughout the business fabric. The data was released by ACCIÓ last July, within the framework of Exponential Day 2026, held in Barcelona: in 2025, 30.4% of Catalan companies with more than nine employees have invested in technologies linked to artificial intelligence, including generative AI. This is six points more than a year before and more than double that of 2023, when the percentage was 12.6%.
Professionals specialized in artificial intelligence have an average salary of 59,500 euros per year
In fact, Adobe's AI City Index places Barcelona as the city that has best adapted to AI in Spain, with a score of 94.24 points out of 100, ahead of Madrid (89.29) and Valencia (70.66). And it does so based on different indicators, including the labor market, such as the number of job offers related to AI. In this sense, Barcelona registers 93.39 job offers related to artificial intelligence per million inhabitants, the highest figure in the study. It also obtains the maximum score —50 points out of 50— in the index of occupations related to AI.
The city already exceeds for the first time 1,000 job offers linked to artificial intelligence and currently has more than 1,200 specialized professionals in this field. These are data from the latest Digital Talent Overview by Mobile World Capital Barcelona, which also indicates that AI profiles are among the best paid in the sector: professionals specialized in artificial intelligence have an average salary of 59,500 euros per year, only behind those in cybersecurity.
Overall, Barcelona already has 135,890 digital professionals, 4.85% more than in 2024, and this talent represents 6.5% of the city's employment. But Barcelona's digital talent provides many more figures. We'll leave that for another Barcelona in figures, another Monday.