Building AI, Closer to Home
For a country of roughly 40 million people, Canada has consistently punched above its weight in artificial intelligence for more than a decade. Its researchers pioneered the deep learning breakthroughs that now power everything from voice assistants to drug discovery, a legacy cemented by the 2018 Turing Award (often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing") awarded to three pioneers of deep learning, two of whom are closely associated with Canada. Its universities have produced a generation of AI talent that the world came to recruit. And yet, when it came time to actually build the infrastructure that runs AI at scale: the servers, the clusters, the factories of compute, the hardware was in many cases sourced from outside Canada.