The Government of Canada is injecting millions of dollars into the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIFAR) AI Chairs Program amid a global battle to attract and retain AI professionals.
Canadian minister for technology and innovation, Evan Solomon, announced the $24-million investment on the third day of Upper Bound, Alberta’s largest AI conference. Funding will be used to support 20 new AI chair appointments and renew 22 prior chair positions, including machine learning pioneer Richard Sutton.
Solomon’s announcement comes nearly a year after calls for more support and funding for Canadian-based AI talent pipelines were made by CIFAR and Canada’s three largest AI institutes.
“An unprecedented global war for AI talent is underway.”
A July 2025 letter penned by CIFAR—as well as the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), Montreal’s MILA, and Toronto’s Vector Institute—outlined the need for increased federal support to secure talent.
“An unprecedented global war for AI talent is underway, which demands an immediate and robust response from the federal government to secure existing AI talent and expand our base of AI expertise,” the letter, which was obtained and reported on by The Canadian Press, read.
“Every conversation we’re having now is about research, commercialization, compute productivity [and] the key is the people,” Solomon said of the announcement. “You can’t build anything without the researchers, the scientists, the students … the builders. Everything downstream—the commercialization, the adoption, the innovation, the policy—it depends on strong research and strong talent.”
CIFAR’s AI Chairs program is focused on exactly that type of talent recruitment and retention.
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Established in 2017 as part of CIFAR’s federally-funded Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Program recruits and retains leading AI researchers with the aim of driving innovation in Canada and training future generations of scientists and AI professionals. Administered by CIFAR, the program funds research projects across a variety of sectors related to AI, with chairs based at one of Canada’s three leading AI institutes.
With the appointment and renewal of these chair positions, the program now boasts 143 participants across Amii, Mila, and the Vector Institute. According to the federal government’s claims, that cohort represents the “third-highest-impact AI research cluster in the world.”
“The data that we have at CIFAR shows that our research community is, in fact, the third-highest-impact AI research cluster in the world. That’s a pretty impressive place to be,” said Elissa Strome, the executive director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy at CIFAR.
“This ecosystem we’ve built of research really is the foundation of everything else that happens in the AI ecosystem,” she added during the announcement.
A sovereign AI ecosystem
Today’s announcement comes on the heels of a flurry of support for AI development and adoption from the federal government, including back-to-back announcements at Vancouver’s recent Web Summit conference to fund data centre development and increase access to AI tools for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Ahead of today’s announcement, Solomon spoke at length on the importance of that development during a fireside chat with Amii CEO Cam Linke on Upper Bound’s main stage. The minister continued to hammer home the messaging he has delivered over the past several months, telling audiences that Canada’s AI development needs to be forward-thinking but built on trust.
“As we talk about building, empowering, and protecting Canadians, part of that is making sure we’re training people … there’s a whole bunch of people that are a little nervous about [AI] and they need to be brought along,” he said. “People have to know not just what AI is, but what AI does, and they need the tools to understand it. That’s really important. They’ve got to see it in healthcare, agriculture, government, manufacturing, and public service.”
Solomon also reiterated the idea that Canada’s expanding AI ecosystem needs to be sovereign and domestically focused but collaborative.
“Our mandate, our goal is AI for all … It means every Canadian has access to these tools,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure these tools are Canadian, that they’re benefitting Canadians, but that we’re working with partners from around the world to build and invest here in Canada.”
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Jesse Cole for BetaKit.