BSC AI Factory Supports Barcelona Startups With Pier07 and Free GPU Access

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center said its AI Factory Accelerator Programme is fully operational after a pilot, giving startups access to sovereign compute, technical support and training. BSC AI Factory has delivered more than 800 services to private- and public-sector clients since its April 2025 launch.

Pier07 Collaboration Space and Free GPU Access

BSC said its AI Factory has 1,000 square meters, 100 workstations and four meeting rooms at Tech Barcelona’s Pier07, providing a place for researchers, startups, corporations and investors to collaborate.

BSC said the AI Factory offers SMEs and startups three free computing options: Playground, Fast Lane with up to 50,000 GPU hours, and a large-scale option with more than 50,000 GPU hours.

BSC said its collaboration with NVIDIA gives eligible startups access to high-performance-computing infrastructure, AI development tools, training, expert support and mentor resources, and connects them with NVIDIA Inception.

15 Startups in the Pilot as MareNostrum 5 Gets an AI Upgrade

BSC said the AI Factory pilot supported 15 startups over more than two months, with NVIDIA, AWS and SeedRocket among its partners. Qatium, OneCareAI and Avatia were named the pilot’s AI Champions, with applications involving water management, atrial-fibrillation detection and a pharmaceutical voice multi-agent system, respectively.

BSC said the MareNostrum 5 AI upgrade has a budget of €129,000,000 and will add partitions for large-language-model training and inference, serving European SMEs, startups and public administrations through AI Factories.