Four Canadian cloud providers have teamed up to launch a sovereign offering for government clients.
“This initiative restores both data and operational sovereignty, ensuring the Government of Canada can run its most critical workloads under its own control.”
ThinkOn, Hypertec Group, Aptum, and eStruxture are each chipping in components of what they claim is Canada’s first end-to-end, sovereign, and artificial intelligence (AI)-ready government cloud. The firms claim the partnership allows the Government of Canada and its ecosystem of software providers to run critical workloads under a Canadian-controlled cloud.
Each partner contributes a different element. While eStruxture provides its sovereign data centre facilities that are already operating across Canada, Hypertec supplies the hardware. ThinkOn delivers cloud and data services, while Aptum provides the orchestration and governance platform.
The collaboration takes advantage of each company’s unique circumstances in the Canadian market.ThinkOn is the only Canadian company approved to sell cloud services to the government, Hypertec is the only Canadian-headquartered original equipment manufacturer for chip giant Nvidia, and eStruxture is the country’s largest homegrown data-centre builder. Notably, Aptum president and CEO Ian Rae is a member of Canada’s AI strategy task force.
“Our locally assembled systems ensure operational sovereignty at the hardware level, and our sovereign-first heritage keeps more value in Canada’s digital value chain rather than flowing offshore,” Hypertec CEO Simon Ahdoot said in a statement. Hypertec also recently partnered with 5C and AI institute Mila to launch the Sovereign AI Research Hub in Montréal.
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The four cloud providers’ procurement-ready offering follows heightened conversation around Canada’s sovereign data capabilities. Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, called digital sovereignty “the most pressing policy and democratic issue of our time” at Montréal’s ALL IN conference last month. Prime Minister Mark Carney recently announced that developing a “Canadian sovereign cloud” would be among the newly launched Major Projects Office’s top priorities.
American firms own nearly a third of Canada’s 283 data centres, but storing information in Canadian data centres doesn’t guarantee sovereignty. Under the US CLOUD Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), data hosted on servers owned by United States companies could be turned over to US law enforcement by request.
“For too long, Canadian government data in foreign-owned clouds has been subject to laws written outside our borders,” ThinkOn CEO Craig McLellan said in a statement. “This initiative restores both data and operational sovereignty, ensuring the Government of Canada can run its most critical workloads under its own control.”
Feature image courtesy Scott Rodgerson via Unsplash.