He, hey. Good afternoon again. We continue with Wakeup Spain Europe. This time we have gone out to Europe to analyze reality better and we are going to have a meeting with one of the great real estate businessmen or entrepreneurs of this country, Ismael Clemente, he is the president of Merlin Properties, that real estate company that is now betting a lot lately on data centers, but has always been with large shopping centers, offices and rentals of large buildings usually and operations that are all in themselves projects usually business what is behind, right? He is a recognized jurist and a great entrepreneur of recent years in our country. Welcome, Ismael Clemente and a pleasure to have you in Wecap this year.
Thank you very much, Fernando.
Let's start by talking a little about the convulsive moments we are experiencing globally, right? Europe, Spain, are playing a role in history, right? And as I said, you are a businessman entrepreneur who likes risk, but well measured. Always as a good business lawyer, everything well measured and well cared for, right? Swimming and keeping your clothes is what there is. A question with bad intentions. Do you consider that Spanish companies are well defended by the government to face the challenge that is coming of costs uncertainty? Because we are going to have effects of energy costs of inflation until the end of the year. Are they well defended? There is a decree there, right?
First, I don't think it is the voice of any government to defend its companies per se. I think companies have to defend themselves. It is very appreciated. Obviously if there is a government that throws you a line, well obviously it is always interesting and welcome, but primarily I think that governments should not be required to defend companies. Moreover, defending companies is usually not within the reach of governments, much less European governments individually considered. Perhaps if Europe were completely integrated and there were a united Europe politically, fiscally, from a regulatory point of view, even from a linguistic point of view, that umbrella could defend its companies just as our strategic rivals defend theirs, which basically if we had something to rival them would be the United States and China, right?
I have seen in some project... we have come to see land outside Spain with some plans and our American colleagues arrive with geothermal maps that God gives them and thanks to that we avoided putting the first data center in history on the moon, because on a piece of land we were buying in Italy they were convinced there was a gas pipeline. And neither the electric company, nor Eni, nor the City Council, nor of course the seller, nor anyone informed us of that, but the Americans had a secret weapon and said, 'It's here.' And we did the test and Clonk was there. So, there are few countries in the world that can really protect their companies and that is not within the reach of small countries, of 50, 40 million inhabitants with GDPs around between 1 trillion, 2 and a half trillion. For that you have to be a superpower with a GDP of 30 trillion and we are not. We are not in part because we have renounced to do so. That is, in 2008 the European Union and the United States had the same GDP around 14-16 trillion and from there, as a consequence of the great financial crisis and the fact that they came out of that financial crisis betting on technology, their GDP has gone to 30 trillion and ours still does not even reach 20. So now they have 50% more GDP than us and on top of that 100 million inhabitants, so their GDP per capita is double ours, right? That is a bit of the little envy I feel when I see our relative position in the world.
Yes, that, look, look at this answer. The other day Luis de Guindos gave me a similar one about how the United States had advanced, how Europe had fallen behind in these years and he also agreed on the issue of breaking down internal market barriers as the basis for advancing further in Europe and pulling with companies, right? Well, they could appoint you vice president of the ECB, which Luis de Guindos is going to leave at some point, you could be there.
My wife would kill me. [laughter]
Your company, Socimi, has turned towards data centers and has even done a capital raise recently, 767 million if I'm not mistaken, successfully. There are people who follow and put money in the company because they believe it is the future and it is going well. Are you convinced that digitalization, data centers and the development of AI are the basis of the future completely?
Yes, I am. And even though I am obviously not a digital native, I am from Badajoz, but yes, based on seeing things, I get the feeling that AI is a productivity multiplier, as few have been seen throughout history, right? We had a first industrial revolution between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th, which was based mainly on coal and the creation of the steam engine and the adoption of the steam engine as a substitute for human strength. Then later we had a second industrial revolution, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th, which was based more on oil, electricity, the industrialization of processes, right? And then there was a third industrial revolution in the 70s which was computing.
And curiously, in a cycle that no longer lasted 100 years but 50, in 2020 the true revolution began, because we were already coming from machine learning, but the true revolution of AI began and in a very short time of robotization, right? Really the beginning of AI, especially understood by the general public, was the introduction of ChatGPT, it must have been around '22 or something like that, and therefore the conversion into a daily tool of something that until then was within the reach of few people, right? It has been evolving and from generative AI that from the common cultural heritage of the internet generates content, we are already at the next step which is agent AI, right? That takes that content generated by generative AI and turns it into action.
Yes. Okay. So, the robot directly, if you give it an account number or something, it does things without you intervening.
But the next thing we are going to go to, obviously, is robotization. That is, the agent, in addition, is going to have a human or humanoid appearance and is going to be able to do things with bionic arms, legs similar to what man does. So, it is the typical thing you cannot avoid. The bad guys have it and the good guys have it. If you go cool, saying no, oh, I'll look at this carefully, by the time you realize it, they have already passed you by and ripped off all your stickers, all the countries that obviously still have the will to develop in the world. We haven't had it for a long time because we are poor people sick of bread, that is, we are first world economies and we already live in comfort, in tranquility, in whatever, but there are a lot of people out there who want to develop and AI is an extraordinary vector of growth and development for many economies in the world that start from very low and are in a hurry to get to the top. And there the data center business is related to all this world because they are necessary, but...
