MADRID, SPAIN — During the proceedings of the XXX Ibero-American Summit held in the Spanish capital, Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader formally tabled a landmark proposal to host a specialized regional center that will operationalize the cross-national artificial intelligence cooperation framework that participating nations agreed to during the high-level gathering. In his address to fellow Ibero-American heads of state and senior diplomatic delegates, Abinader confirmed that his national government stands ready to deploy the Dominican Republic’s existing institutional frameworks, technical talent pools, and digital infrastructure as a foundational resource for the new center, with the explicit goal of driving inclusive, equitable technological advancement across all 22 member states of the Ibero-American community. A core guiding principle the Dominican leader laid out for the upcoming AI initiative is a strict commitment to deploying emerging generative and predictive AI tools as a force for narrowing longstanding social and economic disparities across the region, rather than allowing unregulated deployment to widen existing gaps between privileged and marginalized populations. He further underscored that all AI-related governance and implementation protocols developed through the new regional center must embed non-negotiable safeguards to uphold human dignity, data privacy, and fundamental human rights as innovation accelerates. Beyond the AI-focused proposal, Abinader used his summit platform to advocate for a new wave of tangible, action-oriented regional cooperation projects that directly address shared global systemic risks, with targeted priority areas including sustainable development support for small-scale family farming networks, expanded cross-border social protection schemes for vulnerable populations, and a harmonized regional network for climate disaster early warning systems to reduce casualties and economic losses from increasingly frequent extreme weather events. To contextualize the Dominican Republic’s track record of delivering on inclusive public policy commitments, Abinader highlighted a series of nationally recognized milestones his administration has achieved in recent years. He noted that the country has successfully cut its undernourishment rate to less than 2.5% — a threshold that earned formal certification from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and led to the nation’s removal from the FAO’s official World Hunger Map. He also shared updated economic data showing that national monetary poverty rates dropped from 19% in 2024 to 17.3% in 2025, with preliminary 2026 metrics confirming further steady reductions in household economic precarity. On governance reforms, Abinader pointed to the 2024 constitutional overhaul passed by Dominican legislative bodies, which enshrines tighter checks on executive authority and formalizes clear, enforceable rules to support democratic alternation of power across successive administrations. Closing his address, the Dominican head of state emphasized that resilient, independent public institutions must always hold greater authority than the individual leaders who temporarily occupy public office, framing this principle as a core prerequisite for building more just, equitable, and prosperous societies across the entire Ibero-American region.
Abinader proposes Dominican Republic as headquarters for Ibero-American AI Center
