Spain's €600M AI voucher won't pay for subscriptions

On September 21, Spain’s government unveiled Plan IA360, its roadmap for the next twelve months in artificial intelligence, with one piece that concerns any SME directly: a €600 million voucher for SMEs and freelancers to adopt AI. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, we care more about the fine print than the headline: this voucher cannot be used to pay for a subscription to ChatGPT, Copilot or any other tool. It requires an actual project.

What Plan IA360 announces

The plan rolls out across four fronts over twelve months: infrastructure (Spain is bidding for a European AI gigafactory, with up to €5 billion in public-private investment and a target of 100,000 operational accelerators by 2028-2029), talent, a “social contract” for public administration — with a working group announced for October — and, the piece that matters here, business adoption. The stated goal is to raise the share of Spanish companies using AI from the current 21.1% to 55% by 2030.

The €600M voucher: what it covers, and what it doesn’t

This is the part worth reading carefully before getting excited. As announced, the voucher funds services delivered by European technology companies that provide development, integration, sector-specific know-how, data processing or the redesign of production processes. It does not cover a plain subscription to AI tool licenses: signing up for a paid generative AI plan and calling it a day doesn’t qualify.

Payments will also be tied to milestones, with conditions around workforce training and the actual adoption of the technology into the beneficiary company’s internal processes — not just buying a license nobody ends up using. The stated target is 25,000 companies, with a pilot in the first half of 2027 ahead of the general call, expected before the end of 2027.

Red NEURONA: testing centers near your business

The plan also creates Red NEURONA, a public-private, territorial network of centers where SMEs can learn about AI applications tailored to their sector and test them with their own data. The pilot starts with 100 SMEs across two autonomous regions before year-end, extending to ten regions and 5,000 companies in 2027. The stated proximity goal is that no company should have to travel more than 50 km to reach one of these centers.

Why this matters even if your SME isn’t using AI yet

The voucher’s design confirms something we see daily at Evicron: the gap between “having AI” and actually using it isn’t about which model you sign up for — it’s about whether someone has redesigned a specific process in your business around that technology. The government itself put this in writing by explicitly excluding plain subscriptions from the aid. If your company already pays for a generative AI license and feels like it’s “not getting value from it,” the official diagnosis matches ours: what’s missing is the integration work, not the tool.

What to do while the call is still being defined

The general voucher call won’t land before the end of 2027, and this year’s Red NEURONA pilot is limited to 100 companies in two regions. For the vast majority of SMEs, waiting it out isn’t a reasonable option. In the meantime, Kit Digital remains the most accessible public funding route for taking first steps — we covered what it covers and how to apply in a separate post — and, with or without public funding, a scoped pilot project (automating customer support, tidying up internal documentation, supporting a specific sales process) typically costs a fraction of what any grant call mobilizes and starts delivering results within weeks.

How we approach this at Evicron

Our AI consulting and applied AI projects always start from the same point the voucher now requires: development and integration around a real process, not one more license. We’ve been applying AI across more than 200 projects for companies in twelve sectors throughout Europe since 2019, with or without public funding. If you want to know what AI project actually makes sense for your business — and whether it fits this call or a future one — get in touch: the first discovery session is free and we reply within 24 hours.

Sources: Moncloa, “La IA360 es el plan de España: las gigafactorías de IA y el ‘contrato social’ para la administración”, Forbes España, “Sánchez anuncia un bono de 600 millones para que pymes y autónomos incorporen la IA”.