60% of Spanish companies with ten or more employees that already use artificial intelligence (AI) are still in a testing and experimentation phase, while only 6% claim to make relevant use of these tools. All this happens despite the fact that Spain has one of the most advanced network and energy infrastructures in Europe, as highlighted at the "Global Trends 2026" conference organized by AmChamSpain.
The panel titled "The Global AI Race: Where is Spain?" featured the participation of the VP and country manager Iberia of Google, Lino Cattaruzzi; the vice president and president for Spain and Portugal of HP, Inés Bermejo; the senior vice president for Spain of Oracle, Albert Triola; and the country manager Iberia of Anthropic, Cristina Pitarch. The session was moderated by the general director of DigitalES, Miguel Sánchez Galindo.
During the meeting, it was emphasized that Spain enjoys very high-capacity network coverage reaching 95% of households and 86.3% of rural areas —compared to the 58.8% rural average in the European Union—, along with 55.5% of renewable electricity generation and 301 edge computing nodes. This set of factors positions the country as the third largest park of this type in Europe and acts as a magnet for computing capacity.
However, the speakers warned that the real integration of AI into business activity is progressing at a slower pace. Although 20.3% of Spanish companies with ten or more workers used AI in 2025 —almost double that of the previous year, according to Eurostat—, data from the Bank of Spain indicates that most have still not incorporated this technology into their internal processes or decision-making.
Additionally, it was highlighted that the implementation gap widens depending on the size of the organization: across the European Union, AI adoption decreases from 55% in large corporations to 17% in SMEs with between 10 and 49 employees.
Throughout the session, four major lines of discussion were analyzed: how to transform strong investment in infrastructure into economic activity and R&D projects; what to do to reduce administrative barriers and shorten deployment times; how to accelerate AI adoption in small and medium enterprises; and what type of regulatory predictability measures companies demand from the Public Administration.