Hello to Canada’s SaaS and AI Community,
When Evan Solomon, Canada’s first Minister of AI and Digital Innovation, joined SAAS NORTH in late 2025, the conversation centred on a bigger question: could Canada move beyond AI research leadership and become a place where enduring AI companies are built?
Months later, some early signals are beginning to emerge. New compute funding has been announced, infrastructure projects are moving into development and attention is starting to shift from ambition toward implementation.
Whether that momentum turns into long-term advantage remains an open question.
Key takeaways:
- Compute increasingly looks like a strategic resource rather than a technical utility
- Canada is beginning to invest more heavily in domestic AI infrastructure and access
- The conversation is shifting from policy announcements toward implementation
- Execution speed may determine whether momentum becomes advantage
Building More Than Research Leadership
Canada has long occupied a unique position in AI. The country helped produce important breakthroughs in machine learning research and built globally respected institutions, yet commercial outcomes have often been harder to retain domestically.
At SAAS NORTH, Evan Solomon spoke directly to that tension:
“Leadership’s not a birthright. You got to work your butt off and you’ve got to stay in the lead.”
The broader argument behind the new ministry centered on building what he described as the full stack. Talent and research alone would not be enough. Long-term competitiveness would require stronger commercialization pathways, better procurement systems, improved capital access and more sovereign infrastructure.
At the time, much of that discussion felt directional. Today, infrastructure in particular has moved closer to the centre of the conversation.
Compute Is Starting To Look Like Infrastructure
Not long ago, compute largely lived inside technical discussions and frontier AI labs. Today, it increasingly resembles a broader business question.
Training and deploying AI systems requires access to processing power that remains concentrated among a relatively small number of providers, creating practical constraints around cost, experimentation and speed for startups and scaleups.
Recent announcements suggest growing recognition that compute is becoming a strategic resource rather than simply a technical input. The federal government recently committed $66 million through its AI Compute Access Fund to support 44 projects, with the goal of helping Canadian companies access the processing power needed to commercialize and scale AI systems.
The demand itself may be one of the more notable signals. Solomon noted that applications for the fund exceeded expectations, pointing toward what he described as a “deep appetite for compute and innovation” across the economy.
The broader principle also aligns closely with what he emphasized during his original SAAS NORTH conversation:
“Access to compute is access to opportunity.”
Viewed today, that observation feels increasingly relevant.
Sovereign Infrastructure Is Becoming A Bigger Conversation
Infrastructure itself has become more visible in recent months. Announcements involving TELUS and broader sovereign AI initiatives have outlined plans for new data centres and compute investments designed to expand Canadian capacity, while supercomputing projects and other domestic infrastructure efforts suggest growing interest in reducing dependency on external providers.
The discussion extends beyond hardware into a broader question around ownership and resilience. If AI becomes foundational infrastructure, how much of that infrastructure should remain entirely external?
That framing feels closely aligned with a point Evan returned to repeatedly during his SAAS NORTH appearance:
“We’re not a branch plant nation, but a headquarters nation.”
Originally framed around talent and commercialization, the idea increasingly applies to infrastructure as well.
Sovereign capacity, however, introduces its own questions. Building large-scale infrastructure requires meaningful capital investment, long timelines and sustained demand, while whether those investments ultimately create durable advantages remains uncertain.
Procurement Still Matters
One of the most practical moments in the original conversation centered on procurement.
Michael Buhr noted during the session that many emerging Canadian companies often found their first large customers in the United States rather than domestically. The challenge was rarely technical capability. Adoption remained the bottleneck.
Evan acknowledged the issue directly:
“If we don’t procure made-in-Canada… we’re not doing ourselves a favour.”
That point may feel even more relevant today.
Infrastructure can support innovation, though early customers often determine whether companies survive long enough to scale. For founders, procurement frequently matters less as policy and more as momentum.
Announcements around compute and infrastructure may attract attention, though creating pathways for adoption could prove equally important.
The Harder Phase Begins
The shift from strategy toward implementation creates a different challenge entirely.
The pace of AI development has accelerated considerably since this conversation first took place. Development cycles continue compressing, model capabilities continue improving and expectations around adoption continue rising.
Against that backdrop, execution itself becomes part of the test.
Can infrastructure initiatives move quickly enough?
Can procurement systems adapt to startup timelines?
Can Canada build not only technical leadership but commercial leadership as well?
Those questions remain unresolved.
That uncertainty does not diminish the importance of progress already underway. Technology ecosystems are rarely shaped by announcements alone and momentum tends to come through sustained execution over time.
Why This Conversation Matters Now
Revisiting Evan’s SAAS NORTH conversation today feels less like looking back and more like checking early signals against present realities.
Some themes, including compute access, sovereign capacity and commercialization, have moved closer to implementation, while others remain works in progress.
For founders and operators, the value is not necessarily in predicting outcomes. It’s in understanding where priorities are moving and where constraints may emerge next.
SAAS NORTH is Canada’s hub for scaling AI-SaaS companies, bringing together founders, teams, investors and policymakers shaping the technology ecosystem in real time. The most valuable conversations are often not the ones that offer certainty, but the ones that help frame the questions worth paying attention to.