The government of Canada says its first round of funding through Canada’s AI Compute Access Fund will support 44 small and medium-sized businesses.
Evan Solomon, the federal minister for AI and innovation, made the announcement during a press conference at Web Summit Vancouver on Tuesday. He said the $66 million handed out through the fund will help the businesses access AI compute. That $66 million comes from the AI Compute Access Fund, a previously announced, $300-million program that offers financial support to subsidize the cost of compute to commercialize or scale AI projects.
The subsidization gives 50 cents on the dollar for non-Canadian compute, and 67 cents for companies using Canadian compute.
The funded companies include SenseNet, which uses AI to detect wildfires, and Spare, which uses AI to optimize public transit routes. Other projects span a variety of sectors from healthcare and life sciences to energy, manufacturing, and agriculture.
Solomon said the fund has been “oversubscribed,” and that there is overwhelming demand from tech companies to access the support.
“We are trying to build the best here in Canada,” Solomon said during the press conference. “These are remarkable, innovative companies…we’re very proud to have the Compute Access Fund support that.”
This announcement comes on the heels of yesterday’s news that the Government of Canada is partnering with Telus to advance three large-scale AI factory data centre projects in Vancouver and Kamloops, BC.
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Solomon said those data centres wouldn’t be the provider of the compute power used for the 44 projects, but said the overarching intention is to weave those sources of compute into funded projects as they come online.
“They’re not tied together exactly,” Solomon said. “The goal would be to have sovereign data centres … and as we build toward sovereign cloud and sovereign data centres to, of course, have it be … that small and medium-sized enterprises who are using compute [would] use sovereign compute.”
“This is the dual policy goal,” he added. “To give the access … to the innovation, and secondarily to make sure they’re using Canadian.”
The AI Compute Access Fund is open to Canadian-incorporated companies with fewer than 500 employees that are generating revenue or have raised Series A financing. Applicants must be developing AI products or services, and have a commercialization plan with an existing AI compute service agreement in place. The most recent call for proposals ended in July 2025.
The subsidization provides 50 cents on the dollar for non-Canadian compute access, and 67 cents for companies that use compute that’s Canadian.
Feature image courtesy Web Summit.