The federal government plans to spend up to $2 billion to build up the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
This funding is part of the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy announced today, which Ottawa claims will to expand access to advanced computing technology needed for AI development.
What’s the spending breakdown of taxpayer dollars? First, up to $700 million will be invested to support new and expanded data centres. A new AI Compute Challenge is launching today.
“The strategy we’re announcing today is a major step toward securing Canada’s place as a global AI leader. We’re proud to be a driving force in the worldwide ecosystem, and by increasing access to domestic and secure compute capacity, we will help businesses, innovators and researchers boost the Canadian economy and stand out on the world stage. This is about Canada showing its ambition, supporting Canadian innovation and investing in the economy of the future,” proclaimed François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.
Champagne’s post on X announcing the plan is seeing replies criticizing the spending.
Canada is a leader in AI –with the top companies and talent in the world.
To get even further ahead, we need something more: AI infrastructure.
The Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy will help build it here & bring in billions in investments to keep Canada at the forefront. pic.twitter.com/Nxn5lzTvtg
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) December 5, 2024
Next, up to $1 billion will go toward building public computing infrastructure to support researchers and industries. Then, up to $300 million will be used to make AI technology more affordable for small and medium-sized businesses, through the AI Compute Access Fund.
The feds says that its $2 billion AI strategy was previously mentioned its Budget 2024 and now will use the full amount it noted.
AI nowadays is dominated by the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is backed by an investment from Microsoft. Google has its Gemini AI, and Meta has its own AI. Elon Musk is building up xAI, which has the world’s biggest AI supercomputer named Colossus, which is built up from over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, with plans to increase it to over 1 million GPUs. Anthropic is an AI startup with its chatbot Claude, which has investments from Amazon and Google. Canada has numerous AI start ups but they can’t compete against Silicon Valley tech giants.
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Mind boggling. Money just grows on trees to this government.
7.5 billion in so called GST rebates, so I guess now we can call it 10 or 11 billion after burocracy nonsense.
Merry Christmas Canada. Expect tax hikes in 2025.
Will we ever find out how effective this strategy will be?
On paper this looks like a sound strategic decision because even though Canada can’t compete with already established tech giants in this respect, it’s just not smart to leave the complete control over AI in the hands of few private companies. But given the track record of the current government, it’s likely to become another fiasco where incompetence and corruption will result in a clown show.