The President of the Government of Spain highlights that the General State Budget will allocate more than €16 billion to digitalisation and R&D&I

Madrid

In his speech, the Chief Executive highlighted that the General State Budget for 2023, which is being voted on today in the Congress of Deputies, allocates more than €16 billion euros to digitalisation and R&D&I policies, which represents an increase of around 23% for these policies. In addition, the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan includes €4 billion to boost connectivity and the Digital Skills Plan has more than €3.5 billion. "The commitment to innovation in Spain (...) is one of the main needs and, of course, one of my main commitments as President of the Government of Spain", he said.

The event was also attended by the Minister for Universities, Joan Subirats, and the President of Aragon, Javier Lambán. Sánchez highlighted the commitment to "territorial cohesion", which means Amazon Web Services' investment in Aragon to create its AWS Infrastructure Region. This project will deploy €2.5 billion over the next ten years.

"The construction and operation of the data centres will generate an average of 800 full-time jobs in the first five years, quality jobs, and more than 1,300 full-time jobs in the next five years, most of them in Aragon," said the Chief Executive. "Aragon and Spain want to be an ecosystem of world reference," he said.

The president advocated a humanistic approach, "to understand that being a citizen today means being a digital citizen". Pedro Sánchez stressed that our country has been a "pioneer" with the approval of the Charter of Digital Rights, which has inspired the European Commission's declaration of digital rights and principles, covering "from the right to access the internet, to digital identity, to the right not to be traced or profiled. This real digital revolution that we are already experiencing in both the public and private sectors must be inclusive," he argued, so that smaller organisations are not left behind.

Multinationals trust in Spain

The President highlighted Spain's position in this area. "The investments already announced and future investments in data centres, cloud regions and submarine cables could turn our country into a connectivity hub in which 70% of the data traffic between the US and the EU passes through our country", he stressed.

The Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE) Chip will undertake a public investment of €12 billion. "We want Spain to be one of those places where we also have this important industry," said the Chief Executive. In this area, Intel has chosen Barcelona to locate a pioneering microchip design lab, while Cisco has also announced that its first semiconductor design centre in the EU will be located there.

Upcoming approval of Cloud Services Strategy

In addition, the Chief Executive announced "the forthcoming approval of the Cloud Services Strategy for Public Administrations". Sánchez highlighted the importance of "data sovereignty" which, with this strategy, will promote technological autonomy, data protection and cybersecurity.

The strategy will adopt a "hybrid cloud" infrastructure consisting of the State Administration's own cloud, located in its own data processing centres, in combination with those of other administrations and external providers. "This will be a decisive step forward in technological autonomy and also in safety," he said. The government, he explained, wants to consolidate this network of centres with better services.

Moreover, existing systems will evolve towards the cloud model, with ongoing enrichment of the service catalogue with more value-added elements. Some studies put the savings in energy use for businesses and administration at up to 80% when running their computing in the cloud. In line with the European Data Strategy, common industrial and secure data spaces will be launched, which will help drive business innovation in the main strategic productive sectors of the economy, including the agri-food sector, the sustainable mobility sector, the health sector and the commercial sector.

Non official translation