Betsson picks Malaga for Spain tech hub

• Betsson has leased around 3,000 m² across the fourth and fifth floors of Málaga’s Ágora building, its first office in Spain.
• The lease, advised by Savills and closed in February 2026, includes a fifth-floor terrace with sea views reserved for Betsson.
• The hub will focus on gaming, mobile and AI development, with recruitment already under way.

Betsson has leased around 3,000 square metres in Málaga’s Ágora building for its first office in Spain, a technology hub the Nasdaq Stockholm-listed operator will use to build out gaming, mobile and artificial intelligence development.

The lease, advised by Savills and closed in February 2026, covers the building’s fourth and fifth floors, including a fifth-floor terrace with sea views set aside exclusively for Betsson.

A new-build address

Ágora was developed by Andalusian property group Grupo Insur on Málaga’s western seafront, next to the Tabacalera district. It’s the first purpose-built office block the city has seen in 15 years, and the western seafront has become the local market’s new prime address as a result.

The building will house other international tenants alongside a flexible-workspace operator, so Betsson won’t be alone there.

It’s part of a bigger trend, too: iGaming operators have been eyeing secondary European cities for their lower costs and deep developer pools, following Super Technologies’ Cluj hub in Romania earlier in 2026.

Hiring gets under way

Betsson is positioning Málaga as a technology centre, not a commercial or licensing base. The work will centre on gaming development, native mobile apps and AI, tied directly to the group’s product roadmap. Its stack runs on .NET for the back end, with Kotlin and Swift powering native mobile.

Recruitment has already started for back-end and front-end developers, QA engineers, and AI and machine learning specialists, with Betsson looking to hire from both Spain and abroad. The company points to Spain’s ties with Latin America and its visa arrangements as a draw for international candidates, worth noting given Latin America is now Betsson’s biggest region by revenue.

Jesper Svensson, chief executive of Betsson Operations, said:

“Málaga offers the perfect environment for our next phase of growth. As we continue to expand and innovate, strengthening our tech organisation is a key priority.”

Svensson added that Málaga has plenty in common with Malta, where Betsson has spent two decades building its tech team, pointing to the city’s international feel and its strong links to the group’s other offices.

The bigger picture

Betsson Group dates back to 1963 and now employs more than 2,800 people across Europe, South America, Asia and North America, spread across 21 countries. Its parent, Betsson AB, sits on Nasdaq Stockholm’s Large Cap segment.

The timing isn’t incidental. Betsson posted record quarterly revenue in Q2 2026, yet EBITDA fell 30.5% as higher gaming taxes and payment costs bit into margins, extending a squeeze first flagged in Betsson’s Q1 profit warning. A lower-cost tech hub gives the group extra engineering capacity without the salary bill of its established Nordic bases.

Spain, for its part, is no small market: online GGR hit €454.1m in Q1 2026, up 13.9% year-on-year. Even so, Betsson has been clear that Málaga is a technology play, not a move into Spanish betting itself.

The building is close to finished and the job listings are live, so the real test starts now: how fast Betsson can staff up, and how much of the work currently done in Malta and elsewhere eventually shifts south to Málaga.