Canada needs to invest in its sovereign computing capacity if it's to keep up with the U.S.
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Canada is the birthplace of many core artificial intelligence technologies that are changing the way we live and work. For example, in the 1980s, far-sighted investment by our government through organizations such as the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada enabled Canadian university researchers to pioneer technologies that underlie modern commercial tools like ChatGPT.
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In spite of this strong start, we have fallen behind many other countries in the commercialization and adoption of the very technologies we helped to create. We need a new generation of far-sighted investments by government, and strong collaboration between industry and academia to restore Canada's leadership position and build the digital infrastructure Canadians need to thrive in the 21st century.
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Canadians are avid consumers of digital services — both at work and at home. But they are accessing data and computational power from data centres in the United States when they log into a new AI-enabled productivity tool in their workplaces.
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Canada has abundant clean energy and a favourable climate for hosting the digital infrastructure we need to do our work, yet we nonetheless import digital services. Today we don't have much choice; the tools are being developed abroad, deployed abroad and 'shipped' to us over the internet.
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Some large U.S. digital services companies have deployed capacity north of the border, and that is a good thing. However, there is a high likelihood that their Canadian data centres are filled with infrastructure made in China by American or Chinese companies.
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There is a benefit to having these data centres on our soil, but this offers the minimum possible benefit to the Canadian economy. We need sovereign computing — and data — capacity to support the development and delivery of digital services by Canadian companies. And we should be supporting Canadian companies such as Montreal-based hardware provider Hypertec Group Inc.
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At Simon Fraser University (SFU), we operate Canada's largest academic supercomputing centre: the Cedar Supercomputing Centre. With the support of our colleagues from across the country, we enable 17,000 researchers and industry partners to run 100,000 'jobs' per day on SFU infrastructure.
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