{"id":196220,"date":"2025-10-08T00:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T00:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/196220\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T00:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T00:40:08","slug":"openai-wants-to-be-part-of-canadas-sovereign-ai-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/196220\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI wants to be part of Canada\u2019s sovereign AI play"},"content":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2014 Though it is a U.S. company, OpenAI wants to play a role in Canada\u2019s push to develop its own sovereign artificial intelligence capabilities, its chief global affairs officer says.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical and trade tension between the U.S. and other advanced economies has spurred some countries to begin exploring technological sovereignty. The strategy involves domestic public and private sectors building national digital infrastructure and homegrown AI models to make them less reliant on Silicon Valley\u2019s tech giants.<\/p>\n

Talking Points<\/p>\n

Chris Lehane, OpenAI\u2019s chief global affairs officer, says the U.S. firm can be a \u201cconstructive partner\u201d to Canada and other countries seeking technological sovereignty
\nEconomic and geopolitical tension with the U.S. has the world\u2019s advanced economies reevaluating their dependence on Silicon Valley tech giants, but Lehane says there is \u201ca lot of common ground, specifically on AI\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite those tensions, OpenAI\u2019s Chris Lehane said there\u2019s \u201ca lot of common ground, specifically on AI.\u201d The San Francisco-based company wants to be \u201ca constructive partner [to] help stand up sovereign AI\u201d in Canada and countries like it, he said, in an interview on the sidelines of the Elevate tech conference in Toronto on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The Liberal government under Mark Carney wants to grow Canada\u2019s AI ecosystem, citing the technology\u2019s potential to boost the economy as well as the productivity of the public service. Ottawa has so far committed<\/a> $2 billion to expand the country\u2019s compute capacity, and ministers have promised<\/a> that departments and agencies will buy more technology from homegrown firms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lehane met with AI Minister Evan Solomon on Monday. Solomon told<\/a> The Logic in June that his mission is to \u201ccreate sovereign AI.\u201d But \u201csovereignty is not solitude,\u201d Solomon said, noting that Canada still needs technology and capital from other countries.<\/p>\n

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OpenAI is participating in similar initiatives in other advanced economies. In May, the firm launched<\/a> OpenAI for Countries, a new program that localizes ChatGPT and its underlying models for a nation\u2019s particular customs and the requirements of its public sector. It is also offering to build data centres for countries that help pay for the infrastructure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Countries are turning to OpenAI because of its \u201ccutting-edge technology,\u201d which can be used to build homegrown tools and applications, and because the firm can help stimulate their domestic AI ecosystems by building or buying compute capacity, Lehane said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Governments are also aware that many of their citizens are already using the free version of ChatGPT for education, healthcare and other purposes. \u201cPeople are seeing it on the ground in their countries, being used in a really productive way,\u201d said Lehane.<\/p>\n

So far, OpenAI has expanded its US$500-billion Stargate Project<\/a>\u2014designed to supply its massive compute demands\u2014to the U.K.<\/a> and the United Arab Emirates<\/a>. In Germany<\/a> and Norway<\/a>, it has committed to be an anchor tenant for new AI infrastructure, providing the customer demand developers need to start building data centres. And it has agreements with the governments of Estonia<\/a> and Greece<\/a> to provide ChatGPT to schools.<\/p>\n

In Canada, OpenAI could follow any of those models, Lehane said. \u201cWe will take our lead from how the Canadian government would like to pursue things.\u201d OpenAI has held discussions with Canadian investors, infrastructure providers and firms using AI, said Dev Saxena, a senior advisor to the firm based in Ottawa. To make sovereign compute projects viable, developers need \u201ca critical mass of demand,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Governments around the world are trying to ensure digital sovereignty as the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump makes clear<\/a> it intends to win the AI race with China. The White House\u2019s AI Action Plan aims<\/a> to ensure \u201cAmerican AI technologies, standards and governance models are adopted worldwide.\u201d That includes exporting \u201cfull-stack American AI technology packages,\u201d running from the chips and servers generating compute to AI models and the applications they power.<\/p>\n

Trump himself has said<\/a> his goal is for the U.S. to have \u201cunquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI has been broadly supportive of the AI Action Plan, with Lehane writing<\/a> that it would support the buildout of \u201cthe infrastructure needed to ensure democratic AI fuels growth\u201d and beats \u201cthe authoritarian version\u201d advanced by China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Toronto on Tuesday, he acknowledged that countries where OpenAI is trying to sell its technology are facing geopolitical and economic strains in their relationships with its home nation of the U.S. But unlike goods trade balances, governments can \u201creally work together\u201d on AI because \u201ceveryone ends up being a winner,\u201d he said. Allied nations also have a shared interest in ensuring AI is built on \u201cdemocratic rails and systems.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Countries can\u2019t build the full stack of AI technologies on their own, because supply chains for hardware and software cross borders, Saxena said. Canada needs to \u201cfigure out where we can focus and specialize,\u201d while partnering with foreign firms to fill in the gaps.<\/p>\n

Like other recent visitors<\/a> representing top global AI contenders, Lehane talked up Canada\u2019s existing AI capabilities. He cited the country\u2019s ability to generate power, the talent of the Toronto and Montreal ecosystems, and the availability of large amounts of capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Canada also needs to get legacy firms in sectors like forestry, energy, healthcare and finance to adopt the technology, and ensure the population has access to it, Lehane said. \u201cThere\u2019s a real moment here when it comes to AI and AI policy.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2014 Though it is a U.S. company, OpenAI wants to play a role in Canada\u2019s push to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,4348,90942,46,278,64,61],"class_list":["post-196220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cloud-computing","tag-digital-sovereignty","tag-economy","tag-openai","tag-tech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}