(Toronto) Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the federal government has signed a letter of intent with artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia to work together to create a powerhouse of computing for AI in Canada.
In a message on the X platform, the minister announced that the document had been signed with the Californian company, which recently saw the race for innovation with AI push its valuation beyond the 1,500 billion mark .
Neither side revealed the contents of the letter during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Toronto on Thursday.
PHOTO ARLYN MCADOREY, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
“Minister Champagne wants my support to ensure that Canada can have access to cutting-edge technology so that it can, with the necessary funding, build its own infrastructure and I am very excited about that,” Mr. Huang told The Canadian Press in an interview Thursday evening.
“We have been a partner of Canada since the beginning of deep learning […] and so it’s a very important region to invest in, a very important country to invest in,” he added.
Canada is not alone in prioritizing AI infrastructure. Mr Huang said Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Britain, France and Italy were all receptive to the topic.
The opportunity presented to Canada, however, is unique.
Mr. Huang considers Canada the birthplace of modern AI because two “godfathers” of the technology, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, have long conducted AI research in the country. The two eventually won the prestigious Turing Prize – often called “the Nobel Prize of computing” – along with Yann LeCun.
MM. Bengio and Hinton have since created AI research centers, the Vector Institute in Toronto and Mila in Montreal.
“Canada has such deep and large-scale AI research between Montreal and Toronto,” said Mr. Huang. Don’t waste this and make sure that these researchers have the instruments that they need, the funding that they need to continue to advance the science that they invented in many ways. »