Barcelona’s Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) says it generates about €10 for the city for every euro invested, according to its director, Mateo Valero. He told 20 Minutos Barcelona that the public centre exists to improve science, not to compete with companies such as OpenAI.
Valero, a professor of computer architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), said the BSC’s talent base is a major part of its economic impact. He has long argued that Barcelona can play a leading role in high-performance computing.
He said supercomputing is now part of everyday infrastructure, supporting weather forecasting, personalised medicine, new materials and language models. In his view, it is a tool for doing science faster and better.
Valero also linked the BSC’s work to Europe’s push for digital sovereignty. He said Europe has made a mistake by relying on other regions for technology production, especially chips, and argued that chips are essential for hardware and for running artificial intelligence models.
He said Europe’s fragmented approach slows progress, and pointed to Airbus, Galileo and CERN as examples of what can be achieved through shared effort. He believes a similar approach could work for chip production, with Barcelona as a centre for chip design.
Valero said that five years ago he coined the phrase, “I want Barcelona to be the city of design”. He said the city would need 5,000 to 6,000 chip designers to reach that goal, compared with about 1,500 professionals in the field now. He added that the BSC employs 1,400 people, 35% of them from 65 countries, with 200 working on chips and 150 on software design.
He said the centre has also created spin-off companies and trained professionals who have stayed in the city. Valero described the BSC as the best supercomputing centre in Europe and one of the top three in the world, and said recent agreements signed in California with NVIDIA and Supermicro could strengthen Barcelona’s technology position further. The BSC is home to MareNostrum 5, one of Europe’s largest pre-exascale supercomputers.
