Glenn's Digital Garden

Canadian sovereign AI

In December 2024, Canada announced a Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy that calls for how to use a $2 billion, five-year investment in sovereign AI. The salient points of the proposal:1

  • $700M to support public-private AI partnership projects, awarded on a competitive basis, that expand Canadian datacenters and supporting technology. This is called the AI Compute Challenge.
  • $1B for major capital investments
    • $705 million for a single, large sovereign supercomputing facility called SCIP.
    • A small amount for a secure computing facility to be managed by Shared Services Canada (SSC) and National Research Council of Canada (NRC).
    • $200M of near-term investment to shore up domestic compute infrastructure
  • $300M to subsidize access to AI compute infrastructure through existing providers. This is called the AI Compute Access Fund.

Structure

In February 2025, Canada released a call for Statements of Interest for SCIP; non-profit and for-profit organizations, academic institutions, and consortia were all invited and given six weeks. Following the SOI phase, selected applicants will be invited to submit detailed proposals.2 The SOI grades respondents on the following:3

  1. Canadian AI ecosystem expertise
  2. Technical capacity to deliver a sovereign AI supercomputer, including a detailed system design
  3. Management and leadership ability
  4. Ability to fundraise in addition to enhance government funding

Commitments

Cohere received a commitment of “up to” C$240 million from the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy to build a “multibillion-dollar” AI datacenter in Canada in partnership with CoreWeave.4 This funding likely draws from the AI Compute Challenge since this announcement preceded the SOI call for SCIP.

$85 million has been awarded to the Alliance for 2025 - 2027.5

Players

Confirmed players include:

Potential players include:

  • Hypertec has voiced a commitment of “up to” 50,000 “latest-generation” GPUs to be reserved for Canadian sovereign AI. This infrastructure would be backed by VAST Data].6
  • Denvr is a Canadian GPUaaS provider with a small (128-node) GPU cluster.
  • QScale is a Canadian colo provider focused on HPC/AI infrastructure.

Footnotes

  1. Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy ↩

  2. Canadian government seeks Sovereign AI Compute Strategy proposals - DCD ↩

  3. Telecom Review Canada - Canada Launches AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program ↩

  4. Nvidia-Backed Cohere to Invest in Mega Data Center in Canada ↩

  5. Alliance receives $85M to advance Canada’s digital research infrastructure | Digital Research Alliance of Canada ↩

  6. Major Expansion with Deployment Up to 100,000 GPUs for AI | Hypertec Cloud ↩

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