ALIA-40B

ALIA-40B is the flagship of Spain's sovereign AI initiative, released under Apache 2.0 on April 22, 2025 at the HispanIA 2040 event. Developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center with over €240M in public funding, it is a 40.4-billion-parameter transformer trained from scratch over 8+ months on MareNostrum 5's H100 partition, on 9.37 trillion tokens covering 35 European languages plus 92 programming languages — unusually, all training scripts and configs were published alongside the weights.

Honest caveat: independent benchmarks put it well below the open frontier (around 52% on XNLI_en versus Llama 2's 66%), so it is a strategic public-infrastructure asset rather than a performance leader. Its value lies in European digital sovereignty, Spanish and co-official language coverage, and full training transparency.