Sometimes the timing of events coincide in ways that seem less than coincidental.
Two weeks ago, Canada’s Semiconductor Council released a report noting the “economic and national security risks if a resilient, domestic supply chain” of semiconductors is not developed for the EV sector.
About two weeks prior, The Logic broke news that Canadian AI chip manufacturer Tenstorrent had quietly relocated to the US last November. What does Tenstorrent do? Produce a variety of AI software and hardware solutions of interest to customer electronics companies like Samsung and… auto manufacturers like Kia and Hyundai. Whoops.
Tenstorrent told BetaKit this week (story below) that one of the motivations behind the move was a major investor in its $700 million USD Series D round faced an ownership cap unless the company redomiciled to the US. Tenstorrent has said all the right things about remaining committed to Canada “for the foreseeable future,” and will continue to develop its hardware here. I will note that every company should be expected to make the best decisions for its growth and success.
But no matter how many Tenstorrent employees continue to work in Canada, the value of the intellectual property they create here just fled the country, at a time when domestic AI compute capacity and a resilient semiconductor supply chain remain on the national to-do list.
That realization surely colours the reception of the feds’ Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy this week (also below), part of the $2.4 billion commitment made in Budget 2024. That commitment has been criticized for being both too little, too late and another flow-through to foreign AI companies or large multinationals. But it’s something, right?
At the HardTech Summit last month, in conversation with BetaKit CEO Siri Agrell, University of Toronto professor Arvind Gupta used the iPhone as an example of Canada’s lack of focus with respect to innovation and productivity. He noted you can be a leader in producing the minerals used in each iPhone, or in assembling and manufacturing the iPhone, or you can invent the damn thing; it’s hard to do one, let alone all three, well. Guess which one provides the greatest financial return?
Canada lost its iPhone competitor about a decade ago, and thousands of words have been written on the perilous history of building semiconductor fabrication plants at the wrong time. Let’s ignore minerals for the moment. What else is there?
This week, Cohere announced it will build a multi-billion dollar AI data centre in Canada, with backing from the Canadian government (also also below). Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang’s message to Canadians? “Don’t [brain] drain.”
The facility will be built by an American company and use Nvidia GPUs. Again, none of this is coincidental.
Douglas Soltys
Editor-in-chief
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TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK
Federal government outlines $2 billion in AI compute spending commitment
The federal government has launched the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, outlining how it intends to deploy the $2 billion CAD it promised for artificial intelligence computing power as part of Budget 2024.
According to ISED, $1 billion will fund “public” supercomputing infrastructure. This includes the establishment of a large supercomputing facility for researchers and companies and a smaller computing facility led by Shared Services Canada, the agency that provides information tech to federal departments, as well as the NRC. That facility will be designed for government and industry research and development, including for national security purposes.
On Friday, Toronto-based Cohere unveiled plans to build a multibillion-dollar AI data centre in Canada, the first investment through the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.
AI chipmaker Tenstorrent closes nearly $700-million USD Series D at $2.6-billion valuation
Canadian-founded, United States-based AI hardware company Tenstorrent has secured more than $693 million USD in Series D funding from a slew of big-name investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s investment firm and electronics giant Samsung.
The Series D announcement comes shortly after Tenstorrent quietly relocated from Canada to the US, moving its headquarters from Toronto to Santa Clara, Calif.
Canada Post strike didn’t slow Shopify’s record-breaking BFCM weekend
Shopify has broken its sales record for the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend yet again, despite warning that an unresolved Canada Post strike would “devastate” the Canadian economy last week.
According to Shopify’s retrospective report of the weekend, the e-commerce giant’s merchants generated a cumulative $11.5 billion USD in sales over the BFCM weekend. The figure marks a 24 percent increase on the $9.3 billion in sales recorded for the same occasion last year, which set a record in itself. Shopify has beat its BFCM sales record every year since it started sharing the data.
Meanwhile, Calgary’s Benevity saw over $140 million donated to more than 56,000 nonprofits across 122 countries and territories through its platform on Giving Tuesday, down nearly seven percent relative to its record-breaking 2023.
Musical AI partners with India’s Beatoven.ai to create “fully licensed” AI song generator
As artificial intelligence companies, creatives, and copyright holders clash, Canada’s Musical AI has teamed up with another early-stage music technology startup to build what it says will be a “completely legal and licensed” AI song generator.
The company has partnered with India-based Beatoven.ai to develop the new service, which will combine Musical AI’s rights management platform with Beatoven.ai’s AI song generation software. They say the AI song generation model, which they plan to launch in the second half of 2025, will be trained on over three million songs, loops, samples, and sounds—all with permission from, and compensation for, rights holders.
Trexo Robotics has helped children with disabilities take 100 million steps
Mississauga-based Trexo Robotics says its robotic legs device has helped children with disabilities walk over 100 million steps.
Trexo provides a pair of robotic legs, built around an external walker frame, intended to help children with cerebral palsy and other leg mobility-affecting conditions move independently.
Trexo CEO Manmeet Maggu told BetaKit that his company is working on methods to make its tech more accessible in order to get to its next goal of 1 billion steps.
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BetaKit’s Weekly Roundup
BC – CICE and Innovate BC dole out $9.2M to 18 projects
RCH – BCSC penalizes ezBtc owner $18.4M after finding fraud
TOR – Questrade lays off undisclosed number of employees
MTL – KisoJi Biotechnology secures $57M CAD Series B round
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Lessons in leadership, hiring, and AI from SAAS NORTH 2024k
“SaaS was around, ‘How do you automate business processes in order to empower humans?’ AI is about, ‘How can a machine do the process so that you need less [human] involvement?’”
David Appel (Sage Intacct), Bryan Watson (Venbridge), April Hicke (Toast), and Stephanie Lipp (MycoFutures) talk AI, the changing role of the CFO, leadership and hiring, cleantech tax credits, and how to make leather from mushrooms (seriously). Recorded live at SAAS NORTH.
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Feature image courtesy Tenstorrent.
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