Madrid, July 30, 2024.- The Council of Ministers has approved a direct grant of 315,440 euros, made by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function, to the Mondragón Corporation to develop, through a continuous edge-cloud infrastructure in the European cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) applications Artificial Intelligence (AI) and edge processing to integrate in the production processes of the manufacturing industry.
This investment is part of the Major Project of Common European Interest in Integrated Computing Systems (IPCEI-CIS), and complements the award of EUR 111 million made at the end of last year to the direct participants of the IPCEI, including Telefónica, Arsys and OpenNebula.
The budget allocated to Corporación Mondragón represents 80% of the project’s value, which provides for a total mobilization of 394,300 euros. The project will be implemented by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service through the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures, and the improvements of this project will take place by anticipating errors and optimizing the flow of maintenance operations, and, ultimately, making the industrial facilities more productive.
Its development will focus on cross-sectional elements, with an infrastructure of data aggregation and developments, creating a unique space where the data and the tools that interact with each other will be located together. In addition, it will work simultaneously with the generation of a digital twin generation package for performing simulations with artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and on the edge (Edge).
Through this cloud architecture, a qualified advance will be achieved to apply the use of quality control and predictive maintenance between industrial plants. This objective complements the developments in the European Federated Cloud Cloud that emerged with the IPCEI-CIS. Mondragón is a beneficiary of the grants as an indirect participant and will carry out collaborations with other direct partners of the IPCEI-CIS, mainly with OpenNebula as an intelligent orchestrator of the Edge-cloud continuum applied to the federated learning processes of artificial intelligence.
Support for these projects is a further step by the government in strengthening our country’s infrastructure capacities to increase the impact of the potential development of 5G, thanks to the Edge in this case, in which Spain is immersed. This investment is made within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, and is funded through the NextGenerationEU Funds.
The funding of these national projects in Spain goes in the direction of achieving the European Union’s digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. The investment seeks to increase the infrastructure in cloud and edge computing at the European level in open source that will allow real-time and low-latency services through distributed computing resources close to users.
The Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures, María González Veracruz, stressed that “the addition of secure cloud data storage and the application of disruptive technologies such as AI or 5G will multiply the productive capacities of this manufacturing industry. The Government is investing in the technological reindustrialization of Spain, implementing digital activities and initiatives that will be decisive in the economy of the future”
About IPCEI-CIS
The Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services Project (IPCEI CIS) is the first IPCEI in the field of cloud and edge computing. It focuses on the development of Europe’s first interoperable and open-access cloud-to-edge data processing ecosystem by multiple providers.
The IPCEI-CIS, whose launch was presented a few months ago by representatives of the European Union in Brussels, plans to mobilise a total of 2.6 billion euros, with 1,200 coming from public funding.
It will develop data processing capabilities, software and data exchange tools that facilitate federated, reliable and energy-efficient distributed data processing technologies in the cloud and on the edge, as well as all types of connected services. The innovation offered by IPCEI CIS will offer a new range of possibilities for European businesses and citizens, which will drive the digital and environmental transition in Europe.