en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Spanish government has approved a grant of €292,500 to support ALT-EDIC (the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium) in developing artificial intelligence technologies based on official European languages. This allocation, corresponding to the current fiscal year, fulfills Spain's commitment since joining the consortium in January 2024. Spain currently serves as Vice President of the ALT-EDIC General Assembly, having contributed the same amount in both 2024 and 2025, and will supplement this with its own technical resources, including open language corpora, models, and tools.

ALT-EDIC is dedicated to building a unified language technology infrastructure to support large-scale AI models trained on high-quality data from official and regional European languages. The consortium aims to address a critical bottleneck in European AI development: the severe shortage of linguistic resources needed to train systems that can compete with the large-scale models dominated by the United States or China. At the same time, the project will establish a shared ecosystem accessible to both governments and private enterprises, planning to develop language models, applications, and new services based on ethical guidelines and high-quality datasets, striving to protect linguistic and cultural diversity while enhancing Europe's digital competitiveness.

This investment is part of the European Union's broader strategy to strengthen Europe's technological autonomy in strategic sectors. Spain's Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function stated that ALT-EDIC's work will enhance European technological leadership, foster collaboration among member states, and increase the supply of proprietary language data available for training advanced AI systems. The consortium was launched in December 2023 by Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia, which requested the European Commission to create this infrastructure consortium. Spain joined a few weeks later and subsequently assumed a key role in its governance structure.