Spain just minted its first unicorn in four years — and it’s the clearest proof of a peninsula-wide strategy the English-speaking AI world isn’t watching: don’t build the brains, build everything else
The Hispano-Luso Report
This week, a company from San Sebastián became Spain’s first new unicorn since 2022. Multiverse Computing announced a Series C of up to €500 million at a $1.7 billion pre-money valuation — five times its last round, and the largest funding round the Spanish startup ecosystem has produced in six years.
The English-language tech press has the funding facts. What it doesn’t have is the pattern — because Multiverse is not an isolated success. It is the clearest proof yet of a strategy quietly taking shape across the peninsula, visible only when you read a week’s worth of Iberian business pages side by side: while America and China spend trillions racing to build ever-larger AI brains, Spain and Portugal are positioning to own everything those brains need — the buildings, the power, the cables, and the technology that makes intelligence small enough to live anywhere.
Call it the Iberian AI doctrine. It has a landlord, a compressor, an operator — and, this being the real world, a casualty.
The compressor
Multiverse’s technology, CompactifAI, does something almost heretical in the age of the trillion-parameter model: it shrinks them. Using tensor networks — a mathematical framework borrowed from quantum physics by co-founder Román Orús — it compresses large language models by 80 to 95% with minimal accuracy loss. Models small enough, as the Spanish press delights in noting, to fit in something the size of a fly’s brain; small enough to run on drones, satellites, cameras and vehicles rather than in distant data centres.
The origin story is very Spanish and very instructive. Three founders — Enrique Lizaso, a doctor-mathematician-engineer from Navarra, Orús, and Sam Mugel — wrote a paper on quantum computing’s applications to finance that caught the eye of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Invited to the University of Toronto’s quantum accelerator, they discovered their paper being used as reference material by other startups. «We realised we were working for free for others,» Lizaso has said. Multiverse was born in 2019, headquartered in San Sebastián with a Toronto office — and now serves more than 100 clients including Allianz, Bosch, the Bank of Canada, Iberdrola, Indra and Telefónica.
The investor list tells you which thesis just got funded: alongside Forgepoint, BNP Paribas’ Solar Impulse fund and London’s Bullhound, there is HP, Orange, Qatar Development Bank, National Bank of Canada’s venture arm — and the Spanish state itself, whose technology vehicle SETT has committed €107 million on top of an earlier €59 million. J.P. Morgan and Santander advised. Sovereign money, corporate money and Wall Street plumbing, all betting that AI’s future is efficient, small and everywhere — not enormous and centralised.
The doctrine has a voice
If Multiverse is the proof, Telefónica is the statement of intent. Chairman Marc Murtra — the same repositioning chairman who sold the Telxius cables in this Report’s first edition — has begun sketching where Spain’s telecoms champion fits in AI, and it is pointedly not where OpenAI, Anthropic and Google live. «I don’t want to overpromise,» he says: Telefónica is studying small language models — niche, on-device intelligence for specific sectors, including drones for civil and military use — while its tech arm deploys partnerships like Harrison.ai’s chest X-ray diagnostics across Spanish healthcare.
Read Murtra and Multiverse together and the doctrine crystallises: Europe’s telcos and startups cannot outspend the frontier labs, so they will arm the edges instead — the devices, the verticals, the sovereignty-sensitive deployments where sending data to a Californian hyperscaler is too slow, too expensive or forbidden.
The landlord
Doctrines need real estate. Merlin Properties — the Ibex-listed Socimi anchored by Santander’s 24.7% stake — is spending €7.84 billion to become southern Europe’s data-centre platform: 730 megawatts across Madrid, Álava, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Lisbon, in partnership with America’s Endeavour. By 2032, data centres are projected to deliver 65% of its income, tripling group revenues to €1.8 billion — and the market has noticed, re-rating the former office landlord’s shares 23% this year.
Merlin’s pitch rests on the peninsula’s structural gifts: the submarine cables that make Iberia the meeting point of three continents’ data — the same geography that brought Google’s newest transatlantic cable ashore in Portugal this month — and renewable power cheap enough to run the most electricity-hungry industry ever built. Portugal is no bystander in this: Lisbon anchors Merlin’s platform, Sines is where America’s data comes ashore, and the same cheap wind and sun power both halves of the peninsula. The doctrine is peninsular by geography, even where its champions are Spanish. The brains may be Californian; the building, the cooling and the kilowatts can be Iberian.
The casualty
Every technological doctrine has a loser, and this week identified Iberia’s: the IT-services industry. Expansión reports that Bain Capital has hired Citi to explore selling Inetum’s business in Spain, Portugal and Latin America — €1 billion in revenues, €140 million of EBITDA, a €1.4 billion asking price — with Asian giants like NTT Data, TCS and Infosys circling. The reason for selling is the same technology the rest of the peninsula is monetising: generative AI is eating the billable hour, the consultancy model’s basic unit. Accenture’s shares have fallen some 60% in eighteen months on the same fear.
Note the exquisite detail: the Iberia-LatAm operations are Inetum’s healthiest — still growing while France shrinks. Bain is selling the good part before the tide reaches it. The peninsula, in other words, is winning the AI infrastructure game and losing the AI services game simultaneously — a trade of billable hours for megawatts that nobody legislated but everybody is executing.
The scoreboard
One week on the peninsula: a €500 million round for making AI small, a €7.8 billion plan for housing it, a chairman positioning a telecoms giant at its edges, and a private-equity firm selling consultants before the machines finish the job. America builds the brains. Iberia is building everything else — and this week, the strategy got its unicorn.
For the English-speaking investor, the translation is simple: the picks-and-shovels trade of the AI boom — the landlords, the power, the efficiency layer — is being assembled on the Iberian peninsula, in a language most of the market doesn’t read.
The Hispano-Luso Report tracks the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking business news that English-speaking coverage overlooks — analysed beyond the English-language headlines. Sources: Expansión, elEconomista, Multiverse Computing, Bloomberg.
