Starting in August 2026, Microsoft Teams will automatically create a new type of record called an AI Archive: a .meeting file of AI-generated meeting knowledge, switched on by default and kept for five years. It captures decisions, action items and context rather than a word-for-word transcript, and it lives inside your Microsoft 365 tenant under […]
Canada’s AI Strategy: All the Ingredients, No Recipe
Canada has the raw ingredients almost every other country wants: clean power, a cold climate, abundant water, political stability, and deep pools of patient capital. What it does not have is a strategy that turns those ingredients into advantage. The compute money is announced but barely deployed, the sovereign cloud does not exist, the grid […]
If Not Data Centres, Then What? The Opportunity Cost of a Megawatt
Power is finite, and a data centre is only one thing you can do with it. The same megawatts could go to EV batteries, steel, hydrogen, semiconductors, housing, or ports, and on the honest metric of permanent jobs per megawatt the alternatives usually win by a wide margin. Volkswagen’s battery plant in St. Thomas took […]
The Capital Behind the AI Boom: Canadian Money, Foreign Data Centres
The AI buildout is a capital story as much as a technology one, and Canadian money is deep in it. CPPIB, CDPQ, Brookfield, and Fengate are all funding AI infrastructure. But the biggest Canadian cheques are being written for data centres in the United States and elsewhere, not at home. Where a project discloses both […]
Jobs and Economics: The Per-Megawatt Reckoning
A data centre is a construction project with a small permanent staff bolted on. The build creates a real, temporary boom, and the finished site adds to the local property-tax base. But the ongoing payroll is thin. The honest way to compare is jobs per megawatt, because megawatts are the scarce input every project fights […]
Sovereign in Name: Data Centres and Digital Sovereignty
Ottawa has poured money into sovereign compute: about 2 billion dollars for data centres and public supercomputers, plus a call for sovereign AI campuses over 100 megawatts. But a Canadian-located data centre does not make the data it holds Canadian-controlled. Under the U.S. CLOUD Act and FISA, foreign-operated capacity stays legally exposed, and the government’s […]
Data Centres and Water: The Disclosure Black Hole
Of every input into Canada’s AI data-centre boom, water is the one nobody will measure in public. Not a single Canadian AI data centre has published a measured water-intensity figure. The only project-level numbers that exist are a licence cap at Wonder Valley and draw estimates in Beacon AI Indus filings, and neither is metered […]
Fibre and Bandwidth: Canada’s Two-Metro Problem
Power decides whether a Canadian AI campus can be energized. Fibre decides where it makes sense to put one. And Canada’s real interconnection is a two-metro story. Toronto (TorIX, roughly 2.3 Tbps, all anchored at 151 Front St W) and Montreal (QIX, plus AWS and Google cloud regions) are genuine hubs. Everywhere else is thin. […]
Power Is the Bottleneck: What’s Really Constraining Canada’s AI Data-Centre Boom
The scarce input in Canada’s AI data-centre boom isn’t land, capital, or chips. It’s a grid connection. Alberta’s system operator is sitting on more than 21,000 megawatts of data-centre requests and will connect just 1,200 of them by 2028. So developers found a workaround: skip the clean grid and build their own natural-gas plants. In […]
The End of Global AI? How Governments Could Fragment the Future of Frontier Models
For a decade, AI research and models moved freely across borders. That era is ending. Governments are starting to treat frontier AI as strategic national infrastructure, closer to semiconductors or aerospace than to ordinary software, and the US, China, and Europe are each pulling access inward through export controls, regulation, and industrial policy. The likely […]
The New Battle for Open AI: The Real Risk Isn’t the Technology. It’s the Policy
Open-weight AI is not disappearing, but the real threat to it is structural rather than technical. Frontier models now depend on concentrated compute, proprietary data, and years of operational know-how that published weights never include, and governments are starting to treat that capability as national infrastructure. The next generation of open AI will be shaped […]
Mapping Canada’s Data-Centre Boom
Canada’s data-centre boom looks enormous on a press-release map and thin on an operating one. In our dataset of 18 tracked projects, just 5 are actually running, most of them cloud regions, and real operating capacity sits in the low hundreds of megawatts across three metros: Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary. The headline gigawatts, led by […]
Canada vs. the U.S.: The Data-Centre Competitiveness Gap
Put Canada and the United States on the same scorecard and the split is clean. Canada wins on the things that are physically hard to move: clean grids, cold-climate cooling, abundant water, and political stability. It loses on the things capital rewards: speed, scale, permitting clarity, and a domestic hyperscale cloud presence. The single number […]
The AI Race Is Now an Infrastructure Race
The competitive edge in AI has moved off the chip and onto the ground: power, land, fibre, water, and capital. Canada holds the raw ingredient the world wants, abundant clean electricity, but it cannot connect new load to that power fast enough. So it has built about 337 megawatts of AI data-centre capacity against more […]
The Future of SaaS Isn’t Software. It’s Data Networks.
AI has commoditized the two things SaaS used to compete on: features and models. Both can be copied now. What can’t be copied is a proprietary dataset that gets more valuable every time another customer touches the platform, which is why HubSpot, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Microsoft are all racing to become the trusted home for […]