As Canada greenlights more large-scale data centre developments, an OpenAI leader says the country is an “obvious place” to look for its own project.
The news: OpenAI managing director George Osborne made the remark in a conversation with Bloomberg AI reporter Rachel Metz at the ALL IN conference in Montréal on Wednesday.
Osborne also praised the Canadian government’s efforts to solicit international investment, and complimented Prime Minister Mark Carney for the National AI Strategy’s focus on adoption. He said data centres are long-term and costly projects, so OpenAI needs to be sure they’re placed in stable jurisdictions with a predictable future.
From the source: “We haven’t made any decisions, but Canada would be an obvious place to look,” Osborne said. “It’s a stable jurisdiction, it’s got the energy, and it’s got a can-do attitude at the moment, which probably hasn’t always been the case.”
The context: Osborne, a former British finance minister, joined OpenAI late last year as the head of OpenAI for Countries. The company division is meant to help governments outside of the United States develop AI infrastructure, including data centres.
Osborne’s comments on Wednesday follow OpenAI signing onto the federal government’s non-binding data centre development framework, alongside nearly two dozen other hyperscalers, earlier this month.
Final thought: This week has seen several high-profile leaders speak about Canada’s merits as a site of data centre development. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Toronto-based AI developer Cohere, told attendees at the Canadian Global Growth Forum on Monday that Canada has the potential to become a superpower in data centres thanks to its climate, landmass, and energy.
Those merits are also manifesting in big deals. On Monday, Bell announced its intention to quadruple the planned compute capacity of its data centre development in Saskatchewan on Monday. The roughly $50-billion project puts it on track to manage Canada’s largest data centre.
Feature image courtesy ALL IN.