B.C. company goes out on the edge to stake ground in AI race

Jeff MacMillan, CEO of Victoria-headquartered Green Edge Computing Corp., is betting that his company's data-centre pods can stake ground in AI by delivering higher-powered computing to customers on the edge of digital networks. Photo by Derrick Penner / Postmedia

Article content

The big picture of artificial intelligence is dominated by the giant data centres of foreign players, where Canada is fighting to carve a niche for its burgeoning domestic industry.

Article content

But B.C. faces limits to the amount of electricity it can supply to its power-gobbling infrastructure.

Article content

Article content

Underneath the clamour, a smaller picture is developing in AI referred to as the inference, or so-called edge-computing space, where companies distribute smaller-scale data infrastructure to where customers will use it. That’s where a B.C. based company is trying to stake its own “sovereign” ground.

Article content

Article content

“We’re going see a lot of that,” said Jeff MacMillan, CEO of Victoria-headquartered Green Edge Computing Corp. “Whenever you hear terms like smart city, smart buildings, smart grid, that’s basically code for we need to bring more computing (power) to where they’re needed in the real world.”

Article content

Article content

Green Edge’s bid is to provide AI capability in a ruggedized, suitcase-sized data-centre-pod that can house up to four servers which his company’s engineers have shrunk down to something akin to a big computer hard drive.

Article content

The pods won’t replace big cloud-based AI data centres, MacMillan said, but they do deliver higher-powered AI applications — data analysis and automation — closer to customers, which in Green Edge’s case has turned out to be mines and electric utility substations.

Article content

MacMillan talked to Postmedia on the sidelines of the big web tech conference this week in Vancouver, where the federal and provincial governments made a splash by backing a major data centre expansion by the B.C. based telecom Telus Inc.

Article content

Telus announced the expansion of its “AI factory” data centre in Kamloops, which it is adding to with two data facilities in Vancouver, one it has named M3 in Mount Pleasant that is due to come online later this year and one yet to be built downtown on West Georgia Street expected to come online in 2029.

Article content

Article content

Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon, who was in town for conference, referred to the Telus project as the definition of AI sovereignty, “Canadian companies building things that will function under Canadian law, free from the coercion of others … at a time when the political realignment is happening as fast as the technological acceleration.”

Article content

Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon (middle left) speaks with Telus CEO Darren Entwistle (middle right) during an AI announcement at the Telus headquarters in Vancouver on May 11. Photo by Lori Culbert

Article content

Article content

A dollar figure wasn’t mentioned Monday, but Solomon said Ottawa had reached a memorandum of understanding with Telus to support the project through the federal government’s $2-billion sovereign AI compute strategy.

Article content

Data centres are measured by their power consumption. Big U.S giants such as Amazon and Microsoft run cloud-computing facilities each larger than one gigawatt, or roughly the generating capacity of B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam. The Telus AI factory looks small at a cumulative 130 megawatts.

Article content

Solomon, speaking at a conference on Tuesday was emphatic that Canada can remain competitive in AI.

Article content

Despite it’s smaller size, Solomon said Canada is one of four countries where a domestic company has developed a “foundational” AI large language model — Toronto’s Cohere AI — and its universities produce some of the industry’s top talent.