Ambitions: Sparking Canada’s supercomputing renaissance | Queen’s Gazette (queensu.ca)
Compute Canada turned into Digital Research Alliance of Canada which offers Advanced Research Computing. The big centers are:
- McGill University (Montreal)
- University of Victoria
- Simon Fraser University
- Waterloo
- University of Toronto
University of Toronto
In October, University of Toronto announced it was awarded C$52M to replace their Niagara system.1
Sovereign AI
In December 2024, Canada announced a Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy that calls for how to use a $2bn, five-year investment in sovereign AI. The salient points of the proposal:2
- $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
- Most for a single, large sovereign supercomputing facility.
- A small amount for a secure computing facility to be managed by Shared Services Canada and National Research Council of Canada
- $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.