Canada needs to develop its own AI computing power |
(Version française disponible ici.)
Canada wants to become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI). But by relying on data centres largely controlled by foreign companies, it risks, above all, funding its own dependence at a cost of billions of dollars.
According to Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, the rapid development and adoption of AI are essential if Canada wants to build “the strongest economy in the G7” while “strengthening [its] digital sovereignty.”
To achieve this goal, Mark Carney’s government plans to invest $2 billion over five years to develop a “sovereign” computing capacity. For their part, provinces such as British Columbia and Quebec are seeking to attract the data centres needed to train AI models, drawn by the economic benefits and the demand for electricity.
Such an approach carries a risk: that of leaving AI development in the hands of a few large, mostly American, companies with little tangible benefit to Canada. Prioritizing the energy needs of large data centres also risks undermining energy transition goals by limiting the energy available for other projects.
The strategy of the federal government and the Canadian provinces should prioritize the development of public computing capacity in order to ensure ethical use of AI.
Sovereign computing power
The development of AI, and more specifically of large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek, requires significant computing power to analyze and generate data on a massive scale.
According to recent estimates, training a single model requires the use of several thousand state-of-the-art graphics cards over a period of several months.
As computing demand grows rapidly, cloud data centres housing large numbers of graphics cards have emerged as the key infrastructure for training and deploying AI models. At the same time, the offshoring of this infrastructure raises concerns about control over it. In particular, several countries fear becoming dependent on infrastructure outside their jurisdiction and regulatory authority.
In response to these concerns, major players in the AI industry such as OpenAI and Nvidia are promoting the development of sovereign computing capacity. Beyond boosting........