Sheinbaum and his Cabinet announced that Mexico will build the largest supercomputer in Latin America; In parallel, they signed an agreement to create the Mexican Supercomputing Center in Barcelona to work on complex customs, SAT, climate and other issues.
Mexico City, November 19 (However).– The President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and his cabinet they signed this Wednesday a agreement with the Barcelona National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) to develop in Mexico the supercomputer largest in Latin Americaand in parallel, for start working starting January 2026 in complex topics of the weather, customs and others in the Mexican Supercomputing Center that will operate in the Spanish facilitiesto solve urgent problems in the country.
“We signed this agreement with them as part of Plan Mexico: it is this supercomputing network that is going to be developed in our country, with a supercomputer, the largest in Latin America, in Mexico. We are going to start, although we have already worked with them, with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center,” Sheinbaum said in his morning press conference from the National Palace.
“In the 100 points that we presented when we came to the Government it says: make Mexico a scientific power. Today, in addition to the great scientists, in order to take the next step, we need computing capacity, so that data can be processed much faster. All the supercomputers, which are small compared to what we signed, we are also going to connect them,” he said.
President Sheinbaum explained that, in parallel with the construction of the supercomputer in Mexico, which takes between 24 and 36 months and that “will give an enormous boost to the development of Mexico and the scientific and technological capacity of our country”, the BSC-CNS opens the door in Barcelona to start working next year on complex issues through the Mexican Supercomputing Center.
This is how Jorge Luis Pérez, national coordinator of Digital Infrastructure of the Agency for Digital Transformation and Telecommunications (ATDT), explained it: “This agreement that we signed aims to start now, because building a supercomputer takes 24 to 36 months, if we do that we would be solving problems that we already have today until 2028. To mitigate this we have spoken with the BSC-CNS to start solving these problems now, starting in 2026 we could be working together.”
Data processing, the official said, “remains under Mexican sovereign control.” There will be 177 Mexican researchers who will begin the analysis unit in Barcelona. Above all, researchers from the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti), the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), ATDT itself and the Potosino Institute for Scientific and Technological Research participate.
A supercomputer to predict weather, check customs, SAT…
The projects to be resolved starting in January, Pérez explained at the National Palace, have to do with issues such as meteorological models, to better predict the climate and make decisions in real time that are preventive and not reactionary; analysis of customs information and risk models; image processing for agriculture; and language models with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Rosaura Ruiz, head of Secihti, indicated that “it is a whole process to strengthen this area in Mexico and take advantage of good practices.” “The agreement also has exchange and joint projects, particularly the issue that the President is very concerned about, the prevention of possible disasters due to natural phenomena if we are not prepared, but there are health, education, practically all areas,” he explained.
The officials also detailed that, to work next year, information from the Tax Administration Service (SAT) is included. All of this, they said, will be handled sovereignly in Barcelona, with control of the information in Mexican hands.
“It is a unique, intensive collaboration scheme, led by the Secihti and the ATDT via Infotec. In parallel, as we create this Mexican supercomputer, in January we will be able to resolve issues that, by President Sheinbaum’s instructions, are pressing. It is with total sovereignty in terms of data management. It is a historic step in terms of supercomputing capacity in Mexico,” explained José Antonio Peña Merino, head of the ATDT.
They present the Mexican Supercomputing Center
This Wednesday at the National Palace the Mexican Supercomputing Center was also presented. This is a National Supercomputing Cluster within the Secihti, which is something that the ATDT works on with Secretary Rosaura Ruiz.
Likewise, the Mexican Supercomputing Center that will begin operations in Barcelona in January 2026 in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Next week the creation of the largest supercomputer in Latin America will be announced and it will be Mexican. “It will have a brutal difference with the largest current one, which is in the south of the continent and which is owned by a private company, not a government,” said the ATDT.
Why was Barcelona chosen? Because, according to Sheinbaum government officials, it is one of the most advanced supercomputing centers in the world. Last year this supercomputer contributed 440 projects, from issues such as chips, development of digital twins, planets, human bodies and climate research.
“A normal computer like the one we have at home is not possible to process the amount of data that is generated. Even with us putting together all the computing capacity we have, there are operations that take us up to 30 days to solve: gathering information from the SAT and processing it is quite complicated in the normal computing we have. A supercomputer like the one in Barcelona allows 314 billion operations per second,” said Jorge Luis, from the ATDT.
For his part, Mateo Valero, director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, indicated that the objective of science is to make a better world, “that encourages us to continue working.” “We have very fast computers, we have programs, we have people, and we have AI. The country that does not compute does not compete. Now the country that has its own computers and data will be able to do things that would otherwise be done to it, and done in another way, and will not be sovereign,” said the Spaniard in his turn at the microphone.