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Evan Solomon opened ALL IN in Montreal last week by grading a year of his own AI policy. $50 million more for the Canadian AI Safety Institute. Four pieces of AI-related legislation, two of them now law. The Compute Access Fund more than doubled to $700 million. $1.5 billion aimed at small and medium companies, and a billion-dollar public supercomputer with results due this fall.

Chris Hogg has the full report card, along with the argument holding it together. A country Canada's size can still set its own terms in a technology run by the United States and China, as long as it doesn't try alone. Germany is this year's country of honour at the conference and Canada's partner in the Sovereign Technology Alliance the two signed in February. 

"We don't want people to have to choose between a hegemon and a hyperscaler," Solomon said. "There are more choices. That's why we say sovereignty is choice."

Two of the four bills still have to pass, including the privacy overhaul Solomon says would give the regulator power to fine large technology companies billions. 

Adoption is the part Ottawa controls least, but signs of progress remain. 

Statistics Canada puts the share of businesses using AI to produce goods or deliver services at 19.2% in the second quarter of this year, up from 12.2% a year earlier.

For more, including the five-point framework Ottawa worked out with municipalities for data centre development, and the promised five years of free access to an AI agent for every post-secondary student in Canada:

→ Read: Canada and Germany show what a middle-power AI bet looks like

Bell has structural frames up on three buildings outside Regina and foundations being poured for the fourth. The expansion it announced last week, the one that takes the site to 1.2 GW and past $50 billion, rests on a non-binding memorandum.

Saskatchewan's release called it the largest private-sector capital investment in Canadian history. 

Bell kept that claim to Saskatchewan and described a "path" to 1.2 gigawatts. Jennifer Friesen went through what has to happen before a path becomes a building: customers, commercial agreements, permits, approvals, and any environmental assessment the province requires. The 900 MW has no timeline and would run on partner-developed natural gas instead of the provincial grid.

The $50 billion isn't all Bell's money. Bell's release says the figure covers the data centres, the compute its tenants bring, and the power generation together. Bell's investor pitch casts the company as the landlord, and the two announced tenants for the first phase, Cerebras and CoreWeave, are American.

Which matters, because Premier Scott Moe pitched this as data sovereignty, Canadian data kept home under Canadian rules. Friesen asks who signs the contract, who runs the hardware, and who controls the data.

For more, including what Bell's own share of the spending looks like and the June precedent of a U.S. model going dark for Canadian users within hours:

→ Read: Bell's Saskatchewan AI expansion rests on a memorandum

Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha have signed the definitive agreement to merge, five months after announcing the deal in April. Cohere says the combined company will keep the Cohere name, run out of Toronto and Berlin, grow past 1,000 employees, and keep Aleph Alpha's Heidelberg office as a research centre. The deal still needs regulatory approval and is expected to close later this year.

Aidan Gomez put the merger in geopolitical terms on stage at ALL IN, arguing that a world depending on a handful of American firms is fragile.

"If there isn't a second democratic rail to that project, it's a threat to the entire democratic project," he said.

CBC's Catherine Cullen asked how big Cohere has to get to compete with the U.S. giants. Gomez said Cohere’s deployment model means raising a fraction of what consumer AI companies burn on inference, then pointed out that a fraction of that number still comes to billions.

For more, including the raise Cullen cited from Globe and Mail reporting and what Aleph Alpha's Samuel Weinbach says about rivalling OpenAI and Anthropic:

→ Read: Cohere and Aleph Alpha sign transatlantic AI deal

Some light reading for when you’re waiting for regulatory approval of your deal

Canadian organizations are struggling to turn AI into ROI 46% of Canadian organizations are experimenting with AI without meaningful returns, according to BDO Canada's new productivity report, based on an Angus Reid survey of 520 business leaders. Many are still measuring activity: pilots launched, licences deployed, adoption climbing. BDO's argument is that a faster task doesn't fix a slow organization, and approvals, unclear ownership and siloed functions are where the time still goes.

Canadian institutions back AI's expensive growth years Radical Ventures has more than $1 billion USD committed to a fund it calls the largest in Canadian venture history, with PSP Investments, CPP Investments, HOOPP, TD, BMO, CI Global Asset Management and OPTrust among the named backers. It targets late-stage AI companies, which is where U.S. investors become much more common. CVCA data show American investors took part in roughly two-thirds of Canadian financings above $50 million last year. Radical hasn't said how much of the fund will be invested here.

AI can speed up procurement, but it doesn't get the final say Unilever spends more than $33 billion a year on the materials that become your shampoo and your mayonnaise, and its Toronto AI lab built a single interface that pulls the information buyers need into one place. The system forecasts material prices at 95% accuracy and covers 90% of what the company sources. Gary Bogdani, who runs the lab, said the buyer still makes the call, and that supplier relationships and decision-making are the parts Unilever won't hand to a vendor.

Rogue AI agents found using Canadian university web tools to communicate The University of Toronto disabled the message-board use of its link-shortening service after learning autonomous OpenAI agents had been passing information through it. The university says nothing was breached and no infrastructure was compromised. Reuters reported that investigators identified more than 10 websites used for unsanctioned communication between May and July, and researchers say nobody instructed the agents to do this. They used public web tools as improvised message boards.

ALL IN featured a lot of very big numbers. $50 billion in Saskatchewan. $200 billion in projected AI growth. Billions more behind a transatlantic merger.

Most of them come with a date, a condition, or both. That means there will eventually be something to measure them against.

It’ll be interesting to see if Solomon is as eager to show the class his report card next year.

— David

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