The funding will help researchers across the country train AI models with billions of parameters.
The Government of Canada is investing $42.5 million to deploy new artificial intelligence (AI) computing infrastructure at the University of Toronto (U of T) that will be used by researchers across the country.
This funding will expand U of T's existing AI computing capabilities to support AI research from coast to coast. Canada's Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon shared news today from Toronto's artificial intelligence research center, the Vector Institute. Solomon said the funding will be used to train large artificial intelligence models and provide a secure, multi-user platform for data-intensive artificial intelligence research.
“Countries that control their own computing will control their future.”
“This is an investment in our sovereignty,” Solomon said on stage. “It's an investment in storing Canadian data here in Canada. It's an investment in Canadian discovery, supported by Canadian infrastructure… That's part of what our AI strategy is. Countries that control their own computing will have control of their own future.”
Canada's insufficient investment in computing power has led to threatened his talent in artificial intelligence and research strengths. Federal government $2B AI-powered Sovereign Computing Strategy is intended to help correct this. This U of T funding marks the second major commitment under the strategy, following a federal pledge last year to Toronto big language modeler Cohere. up to $240 million acquire capacity in a new data center in Cambridge, Ontario.
“The practical implication is that we will be able to train and test these [AI] models that have billions of parameters, and that hasn't been possible before in the Canadian academic ecosystem, and we want to make that accessible to everyone,” Timothy Chan, associate vice-president and vice-provost for strategic initiatives at U of T, told BetaKit in an interview.
The funding was provided through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, a non-profit organization supported by the federal government that provides digital tools and infrastructure to domestic researchers. That $42.5 million for U of T includes a capital investment of $40 million in fiscal year 2025-26 and $2.5 million over the next two years to operate, maintain and staff the facility.
U of T plans to invest an additional $100,000 in this initiative. The university's SciNet supercomputing center oversees the system, which U of T says will complement existing capabilities and enable researchers to use AI for applications ranging from healthcare to basic science and technology.
Chen told BetaKit that the $42.5 million investment will mostly go towards buying new graphics processing units (GPUs) – the chips that power artificial intelligence – from US giant Nvidia, with a smaller portion going towards increasing memory capacity.
These GPUs will be placed next to existing U of T processors. Trillium system, a high-performance computing cluster owned by the university and operated by SciNet, located in a data center in Vaughan, Ontario. Launched in August this year, Trillium is one of the country's most powerful supercomputers for academic research. Chan expects this federal investment to triple the GPU processing power of the system. He noted that U of T and SciNet are already working on this expansion, which is expected to be completed by spring 2026.
Federal authorities are also working to create the AI Sovereign Computing Infrastructure Program (SCIP), worth up to $705 million, which will facilitate the creation of a new large-scale Canadian-owned supercomputer to support researchers and industry, with a request for proposals due in 2026.
CONNECTED: Nokia's Ottawa expansion tests Canada's definition of “sovereign AI”
While this investment in U of T furthers Canada's sovereign computing goals, Solomon argued that implementing this strategy requires a variety of partnerships, including with foreign multinational corporations. Earlier this week Solomon described Finnish telecom giant Nokia's expansion into Ottawa is a $340 million project funded by the federal government. $40 million k – as in “what sovereign AI looks like.”
When asked how he reacts to Canadian tech leaders like Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke I'm calling government involvement is “toxic” and Council of Canadian Innovators President Ben Bergen, arguing that cutting checks to foreign multinationals will not “strengthen Canadian sovereignty,” Solomon said federal officials want companies to invest in Canada and said there is “room for both successful Canadian businesses like Shopify and international players looking to grow here, like Nokia.”
“Nokia has been here for a long time,” Solomon told BetaKit during a press conference following his prepared remarks. “They just built a $340 million data innovation center in Canada that will bring 340 more jobs… It's great to see companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Canada.”
In the background US trade war Where federal agencies are prioritizing Canada's sustainability and building deeper relationships with other international trading partners, Solomon argues, “it's always surprising when a company chooses Canada in this way, and that's a good story.”
Image courtesy of University of Toronto. Photo by Lisa Lightbourne.
