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Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Canada needs to invest in its sovereign computing capacity if it's to keep up with the U.S.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We have, for decades, delivered shared digital infrastructure to meet the stringent demands across a broad range of critical areas, including AI, clean tech, aerospace, drug design, medical imaging and agriculture. However, we have never been given the mandate to enable the growth of Canadian hardware providers or to directly support the compute and data needs of Canadian companies. Expanding the scale and scope of our domestic supercomputing facilities is a smart investment to efficiently deploy AI infrastructure that supports both Canadian hardware and Canadian industry use. Sharing infrastructure between academia and industry leads to economies of scale, ease of collaboration between the two sectors and provides training platforms for Canadians to prepare them for rewarding careers. Some say that Canada cannot compete in the era of $100-billion data centre investments by trillion-dollar U.S. companies. I disagree. We need not be relegated to building a branch plant economy in the AI space. Thanks to investments in our university system over the past 40 years, Canada has one of the strongest AI talent bases in the world. In other words, we have the talent base to work smarter. Opinion: Canada needs to start building as AI takes hold Bell announces plans to open six AI data centres Working smarter means leveraging expertise in the delivery of digital capacity in our universities, using our purchasing power to fill our data centres with hardware designed in Canada and providing platforms for Canadian innovators to create new digital services in Canada that can be exported around the world. Dugan O'Neil is vice-president, Research and Innovation, at Simon Fraser University. Sign in to access your portfolio
Calgary Herald
04-06-2025
- Business
- Calgary Herald
Canada needs to invest in its sovereign computing capacity if it's to keep up with the U.S.
Article content 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. Article content Article content 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. Article content Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content Article content 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. Article content Article content 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. Article content 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.
