ADIA Lab chooses Spain as its European headquarters for the development of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing

The UAE-based research centre, a leader in computational and data science in its economic and social applications, has chosen Spain to set up its European headquarters, driving cutting-edge research programmes in five areas and offering an advanced training programme and developing industrial use cases.

Granada will be ADIA Lab's headquarters and so has hosted the signing ceremony of the agreement, held in the palace of the Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo, with Carme Artigas, Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, on behalf of the Government of Spain, and Dr Horst Simon, Director of ADIA Lab.

This new project is included within the areas of collaboration contemplated in the pact signed in February 2022 by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and HH Shaik Mohammed bin Zayed, President of the United Arab Emirates. This alliance establishes strategic partnerships in various fields to boost bilateral economic cooperation.

The First Vice-President and Minister for the Economy and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, who was unable to be present at the signing ceremony due to her parliamentary agenda in Madrid, delivered a message in which she highlighted the importance of talent and R&D in the new digital economy, which is being boosted by the investments made via the EU funded Spain Digital Agenda 2026 and the Recovery Plan.

She also highlighted the important ecosystem generated in Granada in these fields, an example of which is the approval of the construction of the IFMIF-DONES accelerator in the town of Escúzar in Granada, the largest investment for an international science infrastructure in Spain.

All these projects, said the vice-president, exemplify the "country's commitment to scientific exchange and industrial development as a vector of growth for Spain", having established an ideal regulatory framework for this ecosystem not only with the new Science Act, which "provides stability and certainty to researchers, attracts talent and creates quality employment", but also with the new Startups Act.

She also referred to the significant multi-million dollar investments announced in recent months in Spain thanks to the "confidence of investors in our country and our leadership in the technological and digital field", including those made by companies like Vodafone, Volkswagen, Maersk, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and, in recent days, Fujitsu, Airbus and AstraZeneca, to which AdiaLab has been added.

This point was emphasised by Carme Artigas, Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. At the signing ceremony, she underlined that "today we celebrate the fact that Spain is becoming a pole of attraction for talent and investment on an international level. The arrival of ADIA Lab's headquarters in Granada adds to the commitment of other large companies and research centres to our country. This is yet another milestone in our National Artificial Intelligence Strategy and the SpAIn Talent Hub programme, with which we are consolidating a scientific and technological ecosystem around artificial intelligence, sustainability, data computing and neurotechnologies, making us a leading and benchmark country", said Carme Artigas at the signing ceremony.

Through ADIA Lab, the United Arab Emirates recognises Spain's leadership in digital transformation and its strategy in high-impact technologies, choosing it as a partner in key areas such as the digital economy, public health, climate change and artificial intelligence through the launch of specialised research programmes and qualified training, which favours the exchange of students and research personnel between the two countries.

ADIA Lab focuses on research in data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum and high-performance computing, in all major fields of study. It is an independent entity backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), a globally diversified investment institution that invests funds on behalf of the Government of Abu Dhabi. Its Advisory Board is composed of leading data and computational scientists, including winners of prestigious Nobel, Turing, Rousseeuw and Gordon Bell prizes and members of several National Academies of Sciences.

"ADIA Lab was created to address some of the world's most pressing problems via the study of data and computational science. At the heart of this ambitious goal is collaboration. Working together with other leading organisations around the world, we will be able to support new scientific breakthroughs through the analysis and processing of ever-increasing amounts of complex data and in all major areas of study. We are excited about this collaboration with the Government of Spain to bring our new European headquarters to the country and launch important research projects with some of its leading institutions," said Dr Horst Simon on signing the agreement.

Five research programmes will be launched in collaboration with universities and research centres across the country, starting with the University of Granada, which will develop the area of ethics and artificial intelligence and reliable automation.

ADIA Lab Europe will focus on the following areas of knowledge:

• Chance analysis and experimental design in public health: computational methods and algorithms for medical applications, public health policy and environmental studies,
• Economic modelling of climate change and its mitigation policies; development of integrated assessment models to evaluate the economic impact of climate change and the costs and benefits of different mitigation strategies; of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to simulate the behaviour of consumers, businesses and governments; of bottom-up energy models that simulate the evolution of the energy system in different scenarios; and the development of sectoral models in sectors such as transport, construction and agriculture.
• Digital economy, decentralised registry technology and tokenisation: new approaches and computational tools to investigate the digital economy and the role of central banks' digital currencies in the transformation of funding from a centralised to a distributed model.
• High-performance computing: research on strategic topics such as climate modelling, digital economy, causal discovery and large-scale artificial intelligence.
• Interpretable AI and reliable automation: Development of statistical methods to explain the performance of an AI algorithm and automation methodologies to achieve reliable algorithms for human supervisors.

The agreement has a duration of four years, extendable for the same period, and includes the coordination of collaboration frameworks with European and Emirati universities and research institutions, in addition to the promotion of international meetings. Another aim is to transfer knowledge so that it has a direct impact on the industrial ecosystem and to promote entrepreneurship.

Spain, international talent and investment hub

The arrival of ADIA Lab is another step forward in Spain's strategy to become a hub for talent and international technological investment. In the last year, and thanks to the mechanisms promoted by the Spain Digital Agenda 2026, the country has become one of the main destinations chosen by large multinational companies to set up production and research centres, as already announced by Intel, Cisco, Meta, Google, Microsoft, HP and Maersk, among others.

In particular, the commitment to disruptive and high-impact technologies has achieved important milestones since the launch of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Within this framework, important initiatives have been launched such as Spain Neurotech, which will become one of five world centres specialising in these technologies, installed at the Autonomous University of Madrid; Quantum Spain, the quantum computing ecosystem, which has already announced the construction of the first quantum computer in southern Europe, to be installed in the Barcelona National Supercomputing Centre (BSC - CNS) and integrated into the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the most powerful in the country and one of the most advanced in Europe and the world. Importantly, Spanish supercomputing capacities through RES (Spanish Supercomputing Network) will also be available for this agreement.

In addition, Spain has become the driving force behind the development of ethical and humanistic AI, leading the European regulatory pilot and the first country to have a State Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence, which is based in A Coruña.

Non official translation