Spain’s ALIA offers public AI infrastructure to support public services, strengthen digital infrastructure, and enhance AI in government initiatives.
Photo source:
Silicon
ALIA is Spain’s national AI initiative intended to reduce reliance on foreign tech giants. It consists of foundational language models trained on a corpus of over 17 billion words—covering Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, and more—developed under the 2024 AI strategy. Models like ALIA‑40B and Salamandra variants have been released publicly under open-source licenses.
With powerful government backing and supercomputing support from Barcelona's MareNostrum 5 system, ALIA represents a major upgrade in Spain’s digital infrastructure. The project aligns with EU goals for transparency and technological sovereignty, and is overseen by the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA).
ALIA is already being piloted within the Tax Agency through chatbots that assist citizens and in primary healthcare tools to detect heart failure—demonstrating practical applications for public services. These use cases highlight the drive toward improving administrative efficiency and citizen care.
By delivering locally trained language models and toolkits (like the ALIA Kit), Spain is accelerating ethical AI in government. The initiative fosters innovation across ministries, universities, companies, and civil society—encouraging applications tailored for Spanish and regional language speakers.
Experts emphasize ALIA’s value for technological sovereignty and linguistic inclusiveness. By training AI specifically in Spanish and co-official languages, Spain not only boosts performance in local contexts but also supports a culturally relevant digital ecosystem. This model aligns with broader EU ambitions of open, transparent, and inclusive AI infrastructure.
Please subscribe to have unlimited access to our innovations.