If 2023 and 2024 were the years of the discovery of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) and 2025 the great explosion of its use, 2026 is being the year of the expansion of a business that jumps beyond its original borders. Generally from the US, companies in the sector are launching to develop their business structure in new geographies, on a path often more complex than using one of the famous language models.
In this movement, numerous factors come into play: clients on the ground, facilities to settle, available talent, and regulation. A cocktail whose ingredients are not easy to find, but which are abundant in Madrid, turned into a magnet to attract a good part of these new companies and make it one of their central points for Spain.
On June 11, the bombshell dropped. OpenAI announced it would open one of its first offices in Europe in Madrid. It did so in what is one of its five main markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, where it has major clients such as BBVA or IE University. Although it was the most media-covered announcement, it is only the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that has been simmering slowly and under the radar during the last year, and has blossomed 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 in practical terms, the large Spanish companies are moving at a speed that is not happening in the US or the UK. And seeing this, we saw 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 taken root in Spain.
Elevenlabs is one of the main companies in AI models and voice-related agent creation. The company was born in 2022, when in the pre-ChatGPT era 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 such as Banco Santander and Telefónica. “We already work with most of the Ibex. Opening the office has been more a matter of 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 that Carles Reina describes is followed almost millimetrically by other AI leaders worldwide. Databricks has been expanding its staff for two years from a coworking space on Paseo de la Castellana. Just 500 meters from them, the great European hope of artificial intelligence Mistral has also begun deploying its first engineers in our country.
The manual consists of several steps. The first is usually to get the first clients, generally Ibex companies, before the physical landing. The second is the hunt for native talent to then open a small office with between 10 and 20 workers that will grow over the years and coexist with a flexible model in which teleworking is well established. In fact, ElevenLabs was founded natively remotely.
The AI company started with 14 workers in Madrid and also has other employees in cities such as Valencia and Pamplona. “We have just formed an office that is already too small for us. After summer, we will exceed 20 workers and next year we will hire more,” says Reina, who points out that the goal is to make Spain one of the group’s relevant hubs.
Engineers and salespeople. This is another trend of these new offices. They are not limited to hiring sales staff or the so-called go to market (GTM), that is, experts in bringing the product to market, but also have relevant and significant technical profiles, some related to the new professions that AI is creating such as the now almost famous forward deployed engineers, engineers specialized in helping companies deploy this new technology coherently with their existing architecture.
Also in favor of this is the willingness to bring back much of the expatriate Spanish talent and the desire to live in Spain of many workers, who also earn salaries well above the market and over 100,000 euros in senior positions.
“We have a pretty high bar for talent. We try to bring both the best lawyers and the best engineers and sales teams. In the end, that 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.
It 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 talent with a lot of ambition. That has changed in recent years. I am from Barcelona, I moved to London 16 years ago, almost 17, and worked in startups and never saw so much passion and ambition among founders, GTM people, engineers. They look a lot globally, speak English very well, are very good, and want to win,” adds Reina.
The pool of hires is precisely the former tech companies, those that launched their own wave of expansion 10 to 15 years ago and see how the competition for talent is intensifying. If you look at the names of the first employees of many companies, their places of origin are similar: Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Canva…
DATA CENTERS
A person who fits this profile is Eva García Saiz. The Spanish executive took the reins of Nscale’s Spain and Portugal business last January to pilot its landing and development in the country after six years at Google Cloud. Nscale is what is called in the sector a neocloud, although García points out that their goal and what they really consider is a “hyperscaler” designed for AI, that is, a cloud specialized in generating artificial intelligence 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 that exist and it helps us complement our presence in southern Europe, since we already have a campus in Portugal,” explains García.
For now, there is no Nscale data center in Spain, but it is one of the possibilities that could be on the table, as the group has allies such as Nvidia and Dell and clients like Microsoft and exceeds 300,000 GPUs installed in its data centers. That does not prevent the company from selling proximity services, as it does have a facility in Sines (Portugal) that adds to the European footprint in Norway, Iceland, and the United Kingdom that this group has.
Another similar company is Nebius, which formally landed this year in Madrid with the rental of part of the Getafe data center of the Spanish company Merlin-Edged. “Spain is a significant part of our European presence, and Madrid’s solid digital infrastructure and connectivity make it a natural location for our continued expansion,” the publicly traded Amsterdam-based company says, referring to the strategic position for southern Europe of the peninsula, which is translating into numerous investments in data centers.
“Spain is one of our active hiring locations, and we already have team members based there. This reflects both the operational needs of our Getafe facility and the broad European talent pool we have,” emphasizes a Nebius spokesperson, who also points out that, although it is not the default option, the group is hiring locally engineers or other profiles who can perform their functions remotely.
Alongside Nebius and Nscale, the other major exponent in the world of neoclouds is Coreweave, valued at over 40 billion dollars. The US company has also become a reference tenant of Merlin-Edged, to which it rented almost 70% of the capacity of its Barcelona data center. The company already has employees in Spain and has extensive relationships with other Spanish companies such as ACS, which it has commissioned to build a data center in the US.
The BOOM of legal AI
The other sector in which the Spanish market is standing out in attracting foreign companies seeking to compete with local ones is artificial intelligence focused on the legal world. These companies seek to simplify the lives of corporate legal departments and lawyers, and for them, our country has also become a reference hub.
Harvey is one of the most active. The company raised 200 million dollars in March (175 million euros) at an 11 billion dollar valuation (9.642 billion euros). Among the priority markets to deploy these funds and implement its agent business is Spain.
“Spain has always been key. We have programs with all law schools… IE University, Icade, Esade… We are growing a lot in the country. It is key for us. Here we also serve Portugal, but the idea is to build a solid team there as well,” says Bestard.
The company has 300 clients in the country, ranging from large companies such as Carrefour and Repsol to law firms such as Cremades y Asociados and Cuatrecasas. “Repsol was one of the first legal teams in Europe to join Harvey,” reveals the US firm’s vice president to highlight the relevance of the Spanish market.
Also in favor is that many of the large Spanish law firms are in the process of international expansion to regions such as Latin America, which helps bring the tool to these countries.
In the case of Harvey, its hires in Spain mainly come from large law firms, as they seek a profile that Bestard calls “the legal engineer,” that is, people who have experience in the sector and know how to use AI to help legal teams implement the tool.
However, Spain is not only made up of large clients, nor is the AI world only made up of American companies. Joining Harvey’s arrival in Spain is the opening of offices by two of its main European rivals, the Swedish Legora and the Italian Lexroom, which has also arrived in Barcelona and made Spain its major European market outside its home country.
“Spain is very interesting because it has a very high number of lawyers. The figures vary quite a bit, but the most realistic is that there are between 140,000 and 150,000 lawyers working. And many of them are freelancers, maybe 60% and 70% work in firms with fewer than 10 people. There we see a market segment where we can add value because we adapt our entire product to all the needs that each of the firms has,” explains Miguel Melgarejo, director of Lexroom in Spain.
The company’s bet is an offer closely linked to knowledge modules so that each client can adapt what they contract to their modality, that is, if it is commercial law, they do not have to contract an AI product that helps them with the jurisprudence of a specialty they do not master, such as criminal law in this case.
In this context, the group also does not only opt for small clients and aims to reach all sizes. For this, Melgarejo considers it key to have their own team and be seen as locals.
“When we arrived in Spain, the main thing we were looking for, that is, we came with the idea that we have to be a local product, that we are perceived as a Spanish company in terms of jurisprudence and can offer our clients the most updated forms in the shortest possible time,” emphasizes the executive.
Among the absentees, Anthropic stands out above all, but it seems a matter of time, once its main rival has taken the step and more and more international companies see Madrid as a good place to start to conquer southern Europe against local companies. Will there be room for everyone? It seems a question that not even the smartest AI model can answer yet.