Spain commits the EU's loudest sovereign-AI bet — ALIA-40B trained on MareNostrum 5's €90M expansion at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center — without a matching VC layer to absorb startups built on top. The January 2026 expansion, co-financed by Telefonica and Fujitsu, adds dedicated training and inference partitions across 35 European languages, while Madrid layered on a €100M IPCEI-AI pledge in March 2026 with Sherpa.ai and Telefonica named on the shortlist. AESIA in La Coruna runs the EU's first operational AI Act regulatory sandbox, giving local vendors a 12-to-18-month procurement head-start over Paris and Berlin equivalents. Spanish AI VC totalled roughly €410M in 2025, under 1.5% of the global $130B+ AI venture pool, leaving ALIA's downstream ecosystem dependent on corporate pilots from Mango, Iberdrola and BBVA rather than priced rounds. NeuronFeed tracks 2 Spanish AI startups at opposite poles: Magnific in Malaga ships consumer image and video upscaling to a global creator base, while Multiverse Computing in Donostia compresses neural networks via tensor-network methods built on BCAM and DIPC quantum research. A second AI gigafactory bid splitting compute between Catalonia and Aragon is targeted for 2026 selection, alongside Telefonica's 17-node enterprise edge rollout finishing by year-end.