If 2023 and 2024 were the years of the discovery of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) and 2025 the big explosion of its use, 2026 is the year of the expansion of a business that is moving beyond its original borders. Generally from the US, companies in the sector are venturing to develop their business structure in new geographies, a path often more complex than using some of the famous language models.
In this movement, numerous factors come into play: clients on the ground, facilities to settle in, available talent, and regulation. A cocktail of ingredients not easy to find, but abundant in Madrid, now a magnet attracting many of these new companies and making it one of their key points in Spain.
On June 11, the bombshell dropped. OpenAI announced the opening of an office in Madrid, one of its top five markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with major clients like BBVA and IE University. Although this was the most publicized announcement, it is just the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that has been simmering quietly and under the radar over the past year, exploding this spring.
"In the US, there has always been the understanding that they are the first to adopt new technologies and make a lot of noise, but practically speaking, large Spanish companies are moving at a speed that is not happening in the US or the UK. Seeing this, we realized that we had to invest much more in the market," says Carles Reina, Go To Market leader at Elevenlabs, one of these AI giants that has put down roots in Spain.
Elevenlabs is one of the leading companies in AI models and voice-related agent creation. The company was founded in 2022, in the pre-ChatGPT era when it was not easy to raise funds for AI. Reina was the first investor and the fourth employee of the company, now valued at over 11 billion dollars, and has been responsible for creating the structure in all the markets where the company operates.
Among its clients and investors are companies like Banco Santander and Telefónica. "We already work with most of the Ibex. Opening the office was more about formalizing that we also feel Spanish and making a commitment that we have a local team just for them," explains the investor and executive.
The path described by Carles Reina is closely followed by other AI leaders worldwide. Databricks has been expanding its team for two years from a coworking space on Paseo de la Castellana. Just 500 meters away, the European AI powerhouse Mistral has also begun deploying its first engineers in our country.
The playbook consists of several steps. The first is usually to secure the first clients, generally Ibex companies, before the physical landing. The second step is hunting for native talent to then open a small office with between 10 and 20 employees that will grow over the years, coexisting with a flexible model where remote work is well established. In fact, ElevenLabs was founded as a remote-first company.
The AI company has started with 14 employees in Madrid and also has other employees in cities like Valencia and Pamplona. "We have just set up an office that is already too small for us. After the summer, we will exceed 20 employees, and next year we will hire more," says Reina, pointing out that the goal is to make Spain one of the group's relevant hubs.
Engineers and salespeople. This is another trend in these new offices. They not only hire sales personnel or the well-known go-to-market (GTM) experts, who are specialists in bringing the product to market, but also relevant technical profiles, some of them related to the new professions being created by AI, such as the almost famous forward deployed engineers, engineers specialized in helping companies deploy this new technology coherently with their existing architecture.
In favour of this is also the willingness to repatriate a significant part of Spanish talent and the desire of many workers to live in Spain, who also earn salaries well above the market average and over 100,000 euros in senior positions.
"We have a high bar for talent. We try to bring in the best lawyers, as well as the best engineers and sales teams. Ultimately, this makes the interview processes quite rigorous, but we are a well-known company, and people are here because they really want to be," emphasizes Jorge Bestard, Vice President of Sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Harvey.
Harvey is one of the largest AI startups applied to the legal world and also announced this spring the opening of Madrid as one of its first European offices.
"There is a lot of ambition in the talent here. That has changed in recent years. I am from Barcelona, I moved to London 16, almost 17 years ago, and worked in startups, and I never saw so much passion and ambition among founders, GTM people, engineers. They look very globally, speak English very well, are very good, and are eager to succeed," adds Reina.
The pool of hires is mainly coming from former tech companies, those that launched their own wave of expansion between 10 and 15 years ago and now see the competition for talent intensifying. If you look at the names of the first employees of many companies, their origins are similar: Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Canva...
One person fitting this profile is Eva García Saiz. The Spanish executive took over the business in Spain and Portugal for Nscale last January to lead its landing and development in the country after six years at Google Cloud. Nscale is what the sector calls a neocloud, although García points out that their goal and what they truly are is a "hyperscaler" designed for AI, a cloud specialized in generating AI tokens.
"We are supporting a key growth market to support our AI capabilities. Spain is a truly strategic economy. We know the talent and companies there, which complements our presence in southern Europe, as we already have a campus in Portugal," explains García.
Currently, there is no Nscale data centre in Spain, but it is one of the possibilities on the table, as the group has allies like Nvidia and Dell and clients like Microsoft and has over 300,000 GPUs installed in its data centres. This does not prevent the company from offering proximity services, as it does have a facility in Sines (Portugal) in addition to its European footprint in Norway, Iceland, and the UK.
Another similar company is Nebius, which formally landed in Madrid this year by renting part of the data centre in Getafe from the Spanish company Merlin-Edged. "Spain is a significant part of our European presence, and Madrid's strong digital infrastructure and connectivity make it a natural location for our ongoing expansion," convey from the Amsterdam-based publicly traded company, referring to the strategic position for southern Europe on the peninsula, which is resulting in numerous investments in data centres. "Spain is one of our active hiring locations, and we already have team members based there. This reflects both the operational needs of our facility in Getafe and the broad pool of European talent we have," highlights a Nebius spokesperson, also noting that, although not the default option, the group is hiring locally engineers or other profiles that can perform their functions remotely.
Alongside Nebius and Nscale, the other major player in the neocloud world is Coreweave, valued at over 40 billion dollars. The US company has also become a tenant of Merlin-Edged's flagship facility, leasing almost 70% of the capacity of its data centre in Barcelona. The company already has employees in Spain and has extensive relationships with other Spanish companies like ACS, which has been tasked with building a data centre in the US.