A city-wide AI festival held from 16 to 23 September 2026 in Barcelona, built around the two-day AI Summit Barcelona at WTC Barcelona, a hackathon, and more than 50 partner side events. As of 26 October 2026, the organiser had not announced the next edition.
AI Week Barcelona is an annual, city-wide artificial intelligence festival held in Barcelona, Spain, whose last edition ran 16 to 23 September 2026. In 2026 it was an umbrella of three layers: a pre-week hackathon, the two-day AI Summit Barcelona at WTC Barcelona on 22 and 23 September (the flagship, ticketed event and the reason most attendees travel to Barcelona), and more than 50 partner-run side events, meetups, dinners and demos spread across the city, with some of those side listings running from 14 to 29 September, either side of the official week. The organiser's own site treats "AI Summit" and "AI Week" as two names for related but distinct things: the Summit is the ticketed conference, the Week is the wider community programme built around it. Both are run by The Tech Nation. Events Index tracks the Summit itself under a separate fiche, AI Summit Barcelona, because it has its own ticket, schedule and speaker roster; this entry covers the week-long festival as a whole.
16 to 23 September 2026 (last edition, held) for the week as a whole. Within it, the hackathon (HackBarna AI Summit 26) ran 19 and 20 September at Norrsken House Barcelona, and the flagship AI Summit ran 22 and 23 September at WTC Barcelona, on the Port Vell waterfront in central Barcelona, Spain. The organiser's own side-event listing additionally covers partner activities from 14 to 29 September, a wider window than the 16-23 September dates given for the week itself; the source of that gap is not explained on the official site. The 2026 edition was the second: the first ran 11 to 15 October 2025, with the summit itself on 14 and 15 October at Glovo Campus, a different venue from 2026's WTC Barcelona. As of 26 October 2026, the organiser had not announced the next edition.
The Tech Nation, a Barcelona-based venture founded in 2024 by Jérémie Benhamou. For the 2026 edition the organising team was four people: Jérémie Benhamou, Guillaume Rostand, Adam Hruska and Tanguy Wincker, per Novobrief. The idea originated in a conversation at the edges of Mobile World Congress between Benhamou and David Lambert, per The New Barcelona Post. The 2026 edition received institutional backing from the Generalitat de Catalunya and from WTC Barcelona itself as host venue, per the organiser's own AI Week page. General contact is info@aisummitnetwork.com.
The organiser's published FAQ stated ahead of the 2026 summit that it would draw more than 10,000 participants from more than 40 countries, representing more than 1,000 companies: corporate leaders, investors, founders and researchers. The database's own target description names startups, investors, developers, enterprise attendees and the general public as the intended mix, consistent with the festival's open, city-wide format rather than a closed enterprise-only gathering. No breakdown by job title, seniority or company size is published.
The organiser stated more than 200 speakers for the 2026 flagship AI Summit across its 22-23 September programme; the full name-by-name roster sits on the Summit's own schedule page rather than being reproduced here. Names confirmed on that schedule as of verification include Luc Julia (independently described elsewhere as chief scientific officer of Renault and a co-creator of Siri), Nouamane Tazi, Pablo Vargas of Replit, Rory Keddie of Miro, Sophie Cornay of Qonto, Florian Kunzke, Steffen Fuchs, Sam Jacobs, Luana Lo Piccolo, Philippe Sigal, Tycho Luijten and David Arnoux, among others across the summit's seven stages and tracks. Press coverage separately reports confirmed speakers from Google Cloud (John Abel) and AWS (Eduardo Ordax), and describes representation from NVIDIA, Anthropic, Microsoft, SAP, Databricks and Hugging Face without naming individuals (unverifiable information): that company-level claim was not independently checked against the official schedule page. For the complete published roster, see AI Summit Barcelona.
Three changes against the 2025 edition. First, scale: the organiser's target rose from roughly 1,000-1,500 attendees in 2025 to 10,000+ for 2026, and the speaker count from a reported 65 to 88 names in 2025 to more than 200 for 2026. Second, venue: the flagship summit moved from Glovo Campus to the larger, waterfront WTC Barcelona. Third, the hackathon grew: the 2025 hackathon (11-12 October 2025) is reported at around 500 participants working on agent architectures; the 2026 hackathon, HackBarna AI Summit 26, ran 19-20 September at Norrsken House Barcelona with published prize tiers including tickets, a MacBook, VC mentoring and cloud credits. The city-wide "AI Week" framing itself is not new: 2025 press coverage already described roughly fifty satellite events anchored by the summit, per Cointribune.
The 2026 flagship summit ran seven tracks: AI for Tech, AI for Builders, AI Foundations, AI for Good, AI for Today, AI for Tomorrow and AI for Growth, across five stages (Main, Auditorium, Panel, Demo, and two Workshop rooms) in session formats that include keynotes, use cases, panels, fireside chats, debates, demos and workshops. The organiser's own main-theme tags are AI, startups, networking, enterprise AI and investment. Outside the summit, the week added the HackBarna hackathon (19-20 September) and a startup pitch competition with its final on the summit's second day. The database's recorded special formats for the week are hackathons, rooftop sessions, boat activations, satellite meetups and networking dinners, run by partners rather than the core organising team. A session-by-session public agenda for every one of the 50-plus side events was not found; the summit's own schedule is the most complete public programme document.
At the flagship summit: keynotes, panels, fireside chats, debates, live demos and hands-on workshops across five stages. Around it: the HackBarna hackathon (team-based building, no-code through full-code), a startup pitch competition with an on-stage final, and more than 50 independently hosted side events (meetups, dinners, rooftop gatherings and demos) that follow whatever format their own host partner sets, not a format standardised by The Tech Nation.
More than 50 partner-hosted events were listed on the organiser's own AI Week page for the 2026 edition, spanning meetups, dinners, demos and parties, with the fullest listing window running 14 to 29 September, bracketing the official 16-23 September week. The two events the organiser itself ran inside that window were the HackBarna hackathon (19-20 September, Norrsken House Barcelona) and the flagship AI Summit (22-23 September, WTC Barcelona). Individual side-event names, hosts, addresses and capacities are not centrally reproduced in the material reviewed for this fiche; readers wanting a specific side event should check the organiser's day-by-day AI Week listing directly.
Pricing applied to the 2026 flagship summit and rose on a weekly schedule; figures below were current on the verification date, 11 September 2026, and are the prices of the last edition held. Silver: early-purchase price 365 EUR, rising to 495 EUR at the door. Gold: early-purchase price 675 EUR, rising to 895 EUR at the door; adds the Seaview Terrace with catering and DJ, and a tote bag, on top of Silver. Platinum: early-purchase price 1,430 EUR, rising to 1,850 EUR at the door; adds the Platinum Lounge, a VIP inauguration event and an exclusive pack, on top of Silver. Silver alone covers access to all stages, the activation village, the coworking zone, the food court, the afterwork parties and the networking app. The official ticket page states the price "rises 11 September," which is the verification date of this fiche, so the tier actually paid after that date was probably higher than the figures above (unverifiable information): which side of that rise the quoted numbers fall on could not be confirmed with certainty. Group and company rates are available on request through the organiser. HackBarna hackathon entry is separate and free to apply for, with no cash entry fee found in the sourced material.
Through the "Apply to Speak" form linked from the summit's speakers page (/speaker-request). The official FAQ describes review as rolling, with confirmation details provided to accepted applicants; no submission deadline, selection criteria or notification timeline is published. On the verification date of 11 September 2026 the summit was eleven days away and the 2026 programme was effectively closed, even though the form remained live. No later edition had been announced as of 26 October 2026.
Through the sponsorship page (/sponsorship) or by contacting the organiser directly at info@aisummitnetwork.com. The organiser's pitch to sponsors is reach across "10,000+ AI leaders." No package names, stand prices or booking deadlines are published in the material reviewed.
The official partners page listed more than 70 organisations for the 2026 edition without publishing tier labels (no "gold," "silver" or equivalent structure was visible). The most prominently featured names are Google Cloud, AWS, HP, McKinsey & Company and ElevenLabs. The fuller list, as published: Tenth Revolution Group, Skyscanner, NTT Data, Tether, Holded, PingCap, Artefact, Deepgram, Albatross AI, Bizaway, Nebius, Neo4j, JetBrains, Mastra, Aily, Newo.ai, Gravitee, ELO Digital Office, VoiceB.ai, Dataiku, Zencoder, Vapi, Clickhouse, Make, SDG, Amplitude, Hilbert, Prismic, Miro, Qonto, Leexi, Banco de España, Crowe, Strategia, Digital Realty, Quality Clouds, Nestlé, Danone, Softonic, Savills, Damm, Renfe, AirHelp, EU Business School, ESADE, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Albert School, Acurio VC, Next Tier VC, Norrsken, Tech Barcelona, World Trade Center Barcelona, Hackbarna, Adopt AI, Wakastart, Positive Group, Preply, Mantu, WPP, Sovrano AI, Fleet, Virtuix, Framery, LT42, Nuvolar and Fedtuna AI. The 2025 edition is separately reported to have run with 12 sponsors, including Microsoft, Glovo and ElevenLabs; whether any of those three carry over to the 2026 list above beyond ElevenLabs is not stated on the current site.
Not formally disclosed as a breakdown, but the partner list shows the shape of it: global cloud and technology vendors (Google Cloud, AWS, HP, JetBrains, Clickhouse, Neo4j), management and strategy consultancies (McKinsey & Company), AI-native startups and scale-ups (ElevenLabs, Zencoder, Vapi, Newo.ai, Mastra, Deepgram), venture investors (Acurio VC, Next Tier VC), consumer and travel brands (Nestlé, Danone, Damm, Renfe, Skyscanner, AirHelp), and academic or research institutions (ESADE, EU Business School, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Albert School). No figures on visitor company size or sector are published.
For the 2026 edition, working journalists and content creators could apply for a complimentary media pass through the organiser's press page (/press/apply), or by writing to info@aisummitnetwork.com. A press kit with logos, photographs and key facts is hosted on Google Drive and linked from the press page. No accreditation deadline or selection criteria is published.
Coverage found is concentrated in tech-sector and French-expatriate outlets rather than mainstream general press, consistent with a second-year event. Novobrief, a Spanish tech outlet, covered Barcelona's bid to become a European AI hub and reported the organising team and the 10,000-attendee target. Le Petit Journal Barcelone and a related interview piece on the same outlet covered the French-founded organising team and the event's ambitions for Barcelona. ToulÉco and Equinox Magazine covered the event through the lens of its French founders. Cointribune, a crypto and tech outlet, published a preview on 29 August 2026 that explicitly flagged the 10,000 figure as a target rather than a count. No named journalist accreditation counts or media-request volumes are publicly disclosed by the organiser.
Mixed, and mostly unaudited. No outlet found in the sourced material is listed by the organiser as a formal media partner, so none of the coverage above is placed sponsorship in the sense used elsewhere in this index. Most of it is organiser-claimed material restated by trade and expat outlets: the attendance target, the speaker count and the organising team's account of the event's origin all trace back to organiser statements or interviews with Jérémie Benhamou, and outlets such as Novobrief and Le Petit Journal Barcelone report them without independent verification. One outlet, Cointribune, explicitly caveats the 10,000 figure as unproven. Genuinely independent reporting that audits attendance, speaker turnout or the event's outcomes was not found for either the 2025 or the 2026 edition.
Speakers who wanted a 2026 slot: the summit opened eleven days after the verification date and the programme was effectively set. Buyers who need a documented, audited attendance figure before committing budget: none exists for either edition to date. Attendees who need firm accessibility provisions confirmed in advance: none are published. Anyone who needs a refund option if plans change: passes are non-refundable, with only a free transfer to another person available. Institutional buyers seeking a narrow, curated meeting environment: the open-access, city-wide festival format is built for breadth of participation rather than pre-qualified, appointment-driven access.
In 2026 it opened the autumn EMEA AI-events season in mid-September, immediately after Big Data & AI Paris (15-16 September 2026), and ahead of the denser October and November clusters tracked elsewhere on the AI Circuit. Within Barcelona, the September date also follows the city's better-known Mobile World Congress, held earlier in the year, and the organiser has explicitly framed the summit's origin as a Mobile World Congress side conversation. Events Index tracks AI Week Barcelona's flagship component separately as AI Summit Barcelona.
No. AI Week Barcelona is a single-city event; no edition outside Barcelona was found in the sourced material. Other cities run similarly named but unrelated "AI Week" events, including editions in London and New York, and Events Index separately tracks an unrelated AI Week Milan; none of these share an organiser or a programme with the Barcelona event covered here.
The organiser's FAQ states the official AI Week programme is available in English, Spanish and Catalan. For the flagship summit specifically, the published session and speaker material is in English throughout, consistent with an international speaker line-up; no simultaneous interpretation for the summit is confirmed either way in the sourced material.
Not publicly disclosed. No virtual ticket, livestream or session-replay policy was found on the official site's FAQ, ticket or press pages as of verification, and every ticket tier on sale is an in-person, on-site pass.
Passes are non-refundable. The official ticket page states a purchased pass can be transferred free of charge to another person at any time before the summit; no cancellation or postponement policy beyond that is published.
Not publicly disclosed. The official FAQ, ticket and press pages reviewed for this fiche contain no statement on step-free access, sign language interpretation, hearing loops, quiet rooms or a named accessibility contact.
WTC Barcelona sits on the Port Vell waterfront in central Barcelona. Per the organiser's FAQ: Barcelona-El Prat airport (BCN) is roughly a 20-minute drive from the venue; metro line L3 serves Drassanes station near the venue; taxis are readily available along the waterfront; and Yego shared electric scooters are available for getting around the city during the week. The organiser also lists a recommended-hotel portal with attendee rates near the venue.
The event is one of the few AI gatherings in Europe that pairs a ticketed, seven-track flagship summit with a genuinely open, city-wide side-event layer: more than 50 partner-hosted meetups, dinners and demos around a single week, alongside a dedicated hackathon with real prizes attached. For a founder, developer or investor who wants both structured programming and informal access to Barcelona's own AI and startup community in one trip, that combination is the draw, and it is largely why the organiser can plausibly claim attendees from more than 40 countries and 1,000 companies for a second-year event.
Every scale figure attached to this event is an organiser projection, and the record for 2025 is not even internally consistent: one outlet reports roughly 1,000 attendees and 65 speakers for the first edition, another reports around 1,200 to 1,500 attendees and 88 speakers, and the 10,000-plus target for 2026 is described explicitly by at least one outlet, Cointribune, as a goal rather than a realised number. This fiche's own database record separately carried a 20,000-plus citywide participation figure that the organiser's own enrichment notes flagged as unconfirmed and that does not appear on the current official site; it has been left out here for that reason. Until an edition-close count is published by the organiser or independently verified, every attendance and speaker number on this page should be read as ambition, not as a count.
Official site: https://aisummitbarcelona.com. AI Week overview: https://aisummitbarcelona.com/ai-week. Tickets: https://aisummitbarcelona.com/tickets. Schedule: https://aisummitbarcelona.com/schedule. Hackathon: https://aisummitbarcelona.com/hackathon. Sponsorship: https://aisummitbarcelona.com/sponsorship. Press: https://aisummitbarcelona.com/press. General and press contact: info@aisummitnetwork.com. The flagship summit has its own fiche in this index, AI Summit Barcelona, with its full speaker roster and ticket detail.