● The ministry has allocated more than 200 million euros for five similar calls that are part of the Program to Promote Smart Cities and Territories for the Promotion of Economic and Productive Development
● María González Veracruz has also announced that her department will mobilize nearly 500 million euros in the second half of 2025 through the calls for Red.es
The Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, María González Veracruz, announced today a new call for grants worth more than 87 million euros for the promotion of smart cities and territories.
“We want to help local entities to improve their technological infrastructure, to channel the potential of their data towards economic development and implement advanced solutions such as artificial intelligence or digital twins,” confirmed the Secretary of State during the opening of the Digital Economy and Telecommunications Meeting 2025 that the association of the digital industry sector in Spain, Ametic, celebrates these days in Santander.
The new call is part of the Programme to Promote Smart Cities and Territories for the Promotion of Economic and Productive Development managed by Red.es, a public business entity under the ministry headed by Óscar López. To date, a total of five similar calls have been resolved with an investment of more than 200 million euros from which 59 initiatives distributed throughout the national territory have benefited.
During his speech, González Veracruz also reviewed some of the achievements of the department, such as the more than 3 billion euros invested in connectivity, the installation of the first quantum computer of 100% European technology, the development of the Digital Kit with more than 780,000 aids to SMEs and self-employed workers or the start-up of the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), which has 16 billion euros and has already specified co-investment operations in Spanish chip, semiconductor and deeptech companies to scale its production.
He has also announced that the ministry will mobilize, through the next calls for Red.es, up to 500 million euros in the second half of 2025. “With this you can get an idea of the volume of public investment that we will activate before 2026 in areas such as cybersecurity, Data Space or 5G,” he added.
Finally, the Secretary of State has once again committed to public-private collaboration to continue advancing the process of digitalization of the country. “The public machinery does not stop and the Government of Spain needs you to consolidate our country as a European node of the digital revolution. We need you to enthusiastically multiply the value of each project and to lead a transformation that is committed to technological humanism, digital rights and sustainability”, he concluded.
RedCyTI 2025
The announcement RedCyTI 2025, announced today by González Veracruz, seeks to promote from the cities and territories, an economic development model based on sustainability, innovation and digitalization in order to improve productivity, generate employment, create new business models and offer advanced services to citizens that contribute to the improvement of their quality of life.
The aid, the funding of which amounts to EUR 87,155,632 from the ERDF funds and from the EML0 own funds, will go to local entities, uniprovincial autonomous communities and autonomous cities. The initiatives presented will have to have a budget of between 1.5 and 6 million euros for the provision of technological infrastructures and associated solutions such as test spaces or sandboxes, urban innovation laboratories, demonstration spaces or experimentation centers. In addition, they must pursue the valorisation of data collected on city platforms, using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence or digital twins.