Canadian AI: Moment Energy raises US$40M to turn used EV batteries into data centre power, Sanofi commits $294M to its Toronto AI hub, and Telus and Ottawa drop $1B on a BC AI cluster
Plus, Canada's privacy commissioners pin OpenAI, a Canadian telco is using AI to mask offshore accents, and Mila has its busiest non-conference week of the year.
Good morning! Welcome to the Canadian AI Newsletter, a weekly rundown for founders, operators and investors.
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I am Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners. Views are my own.
This was sovereign-AI-infrastructure week, with a side of regulator and union pushback. Telus and Ottawa unveiled a roughly $1B, three-site B.C. AI cluster scaling to 60,000 GPUs by 2032. Sanofi committed $294M to expand its Toronto AI Centre of Excellence with global mandates. Canada’s four privacy commissioners handed OpenAI its first formal PIPEDA ruling, with BC and Alberta landing on a principle that should rattle every Canadian-operating model trainer: you can’t fix a consent violation after the fact. La Presse broke the story that a major Canadian telecom has been using AI to mask the accents of offshore call-centre agents. Solomon’s response, sort of: the federal AI Strategy is “coming very soon” (a phrase now in its third consecutive issue), plus a new AI & Labour Advisory Council. Mila had its busiest non-conference week of the year. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Moment Energy closes a US$40M Series B to turn retired EV batteries into data centre energy storage (PR Newswire, May 5).
Port Coquitlam, BC. The pitch: AI is breaking the grid. Moment takes used EV battery packs from automakers and repackages them into stationary BESS systems sized for data centres feeling the squeeze on grid capacity.
Oversubscribed round led by Evok Innovations (Vancouver), with participation from Liberty Mutual Investments, W23 Global, Tokyo Gas’s Acario, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Voyager, In-Q-Tel, MCJ, Overture, Fika, and Garage Capital. Total raised now north of US$100M.
Founders Edward Chiang (CEO), Sumreen Rattan (COO), Gabriel Soares (CTO), and Gurmesh Sidhu (CPO) are all SFU engineering grads. Scaling Port Coquitlam HQ plus a 200,000 sq ft Austin gigafactory; ~70 to ~250 headcount.
Investor Marty Reed of Evok, joining the board, calls it “a real-world use case for Physical AI.” When cleantech companies are pitching the AI-grid-bottleneck thesis and US defence venture (In-Q-Tel) is on the cap table, you know the narrative has crossed over.
Vendasta lands a $1.4M PrairiesCan RAII grant as its “AI employee” MARiO rolls out to 100,000+ Italian SMBs (BNN Bloomberg/GlobeNewswire, May 7).
$1,416,100 under PrairiesCan’s Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Minister Eleanor Olszewski made the announcement.
MARiO handles calls, books appointments, captures leads, and works multilingual. It’s now being deployed to 100,000+ SMBs via Italiaonline, Italy’s largest internet company. Vendasta beat out Silicon Valley competitors for the deal.
CEO Brendan King has built Vendasta in Saskatoon since 2008, with a 60,000+ channel-partner network reaching 8M+ local businesses globally.
The interesting bit isn’t the grant size, it’s the deal shape. Vendasta isn’t a frontier-model company. It’s a distribution layer for AI agents into SMBs through resellers. A Saskatoon company is winning the Italian SMB market.
Toronto-based Neuron IP wins 2026 Startup of the Year at the Chips North Executive Summit in Ottawa (Design & Reuse, May 4-5).
Neuron IP designs the high-speed silicon interface IP (SerDes, PHYs, UCIe, PCIe, CXL) that lets chiplets in a single advanced package talk to each other. The connective tissue inside modern AI accelerators and data centre GPUs.
Toronto HQ, founded late 2020 by CEO Saman Sadr. Already has presence in Spain and Mexico; opened a €10M R&D centre at UPC North Campus, Barcelona in late 2024. Customers across AI/ML, HPC/data centre, and 5G.
Award presented by Chris Smith (VP at AMD) on behalf of Canada’s Semiconductor Council, alongside RANOVUS CEO Hamid Arabzadeh, CPFC DG Velko Tzolov, ventureLAB CEO Melissa Chee, and Synopsys SVP Dino Toffolon.
Canada doesn’t make AI chips end-to-end, but it does make some of the IP inside them. Neuron IP is the cleanest example of a Canadian semiconductor startup that’s already inside the global AI chip supply chain.
Ontario backs NodeAI as part of a $5M life-sciences and healthtech round (May 11).
NodeAI applies ML to drug development workflows. The only verifiably AI-native name on a nine-company cohort funded through Ontario Centre for Innovation’s Life Sciences Innovation Fund.
Worth a watch. Pairs with the Sanofi story below on the AI-in-pharma signal Ontario is putting out this quarter.
🏢 Large Companies / Big Tech
Sanofi commits $294M to expand its Toronto AI Centre of Excellence (Reuters and Invest Ontario, May 4).
$294M over four years, with up to $5M conditional from the Invest Ontario Fund. 50 net-new AI/ML/data-science roles by 2028 on top of the 150-person hub launched in 2022.
Part of a $2B+ Sanofi commitment to Canada through 2028 across the 52-acre Toronto campus. Premier Doug Ford, Sylvia Jones, Vic Fedeli, and Mayor Olivia Chow at the announcement.
The rare AI investment in Canada where the demand side (drug discovery, clinical trials, manufacturing optimization) is bigger than the supply side, and where Toronto holds global mandates for a CAC 40 company. Reuters running this on the global wire on Day 1 of the week is the validation.
Telus and the federal government unveil a ~$1B, three-site B.C. AI cluster, scaling to 60,000 GPUs by 2032 (Newswire/CNW and Business in Vancouver, May 11).
Three sites: Kamloops KIDC expansion (online late 2026); a 100,000 sq ft M3 facility at Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant (Q4 2026, 13,000 GPUs, 26 MW); and a 400,000 sq ft, 50,000-GPU, 100 MW build at 150 West Georgia downtown (2029, with Westbank as partner). NVIDIA GPUs throughout.
Initial 85 MW from BC Hydro (98% renewable). Scales to 150 MW by 2032. ~$1B capex. $9B projected economic activity; 1,000 construction plus 525 permanent high-skill jobs.
Closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling. 80% less cooling energy, 90% less water. Waste heat piped to Vancouver Neighbourhood Energy Utility and Creative Energy district networks, equivalent to heating 150,000 homes.
Darren Entwistle, retiring as TELUS CEO end of June after 26 years, on the buildouts: “every single computation will happen right here on Canadian soil.” Solomon framed the announcement as “steel, concrete, and code,” riffing on a Carney line.
Telus’s Rimouski, QC sovereign AI factory, opened last September, is already sold out.
La Presse: a major Canadian telecom is using AI to mask offshore call-centre agents’ accents on customer calls (La Presse, May 5).
The Alliance canadienne des travailleurs et travailleuses des télécommunications (Unifor + USW Métallos + CUPE, 32,000 telecom workers combined) revealed the practice. The telco is not named in the article.
Roch Leblanc, Unifor’s telecom sector director: the practice could “tromper des Canadiens,” deceiving customers into thinking they are speaking to a domestic worker.
Nathalie Blais of CUPE is demanding a permanent federal tripartite AI labour working group. Which, conveniently, ties to Solomon’s new AI & Labour Advisory Council below.
Would it get the same reaction if it were real-time translation?
🔬 Research
Mila has its busiest non-conference week of the year, with three new industry partnerships and a 10-year milestone (Mila newsroom, May 4 to May 11).
May 4: AI4Good Lab hits 10 years. Co-founders Doina Precup (McGill, Mila Core Academic Member, DeepMind Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair) and Angelique Mannella reflect on a decade of training women and equity-deserving groups in AI research. The talent-pipeline marker.
May 5: Bell and Mila run a national hackathon on safer AI for youth mental health, with clinical-safety prototypes delivered out the back. Frames the Bengio-era safe-AI thesis as a concrete youth-safety vertical, the area Canadian regulators (CRTC, OPC) are most likely to legislate first.
May 6: Mila partners with Maya HTT, a Montréal-based engineering software firm serving aerospace, energy, and heavy industry. Comes two weeks after the late-April Aéro Montréal partnership.
May 11: Mila signs Montréal healthcare-AI startup Secai (Voxira platform) as a research partner. Voxira Voice handles appointments and patient inquiries; Voxira Scribe transcribes clinical notes in real time. Voxira is the first AI voice agent to receive TGV certification from the Quebec Ministry of Health. CEO Dr. Ragui Ibrahim: “The collaboration with Mila validates the depth of our technology.”
Three industry partnerships in three weeks under new scientific director Hugo Larochelle, plus a 10-year talent-pipeline marker. Mila’s commercialization cadence is real, not aspirational.
The federal sovereign-AI compute call drew 160 proposals (BetaKit, revealed at the Telus announcement May 11).
Solomon at the Telus event: 160 proposals were assessed across sovereignty, economic benefit, performance, energy, readiness, and cost. Telus is the first publicly-announced winner.
The operational arm of ISED’s Enabling Large-Scale Sovereign AI Data Centres initiative. Worth watching what announcement #2 looks like.
🏛 Policy
Canada’s four privacy commissioners rule that OpenAI violated PIPEDA in training GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on Canadians’ personal data (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, May 6).
Federal Commissioner Philippe Dufresne joined by his BC, Alberta, and Quebec counterparts. The full 128-page findings report is cited 2026 BCIPC 41 / PIPEDA Findings #2026-002.
The headline finding: OPC under PIPEDA found the complaint well-founded and “conditionally resolved.” BC and Alberta found it well-founded and unresolved. Quebec’s CAI found OpenAI largely non-compliant.
The principle that matters most for any Canadian-operating model trainer comes from BC and Alberta: retroactive consent is not consent.
OpenAI agreed to a 3-6 month remediation plan with quarterly compliance reports: signed-out ChatGPT data-use notices, improved data-export tools, retired-dataset protections, and protective measures for minor family members of public figures.
AI Minister Evan Solomon: the federal AI Strategy is “coming very soon,” plus a new AI & Labour Advisory Council (CP via BNN Bloomberg May 4, and BetaKit May 8).
“Coming very soon” has now been said in three consecutive issues. Mark your calendars.
Solomon also announced an AI & Labour Advisory Council, following meetings with the Canadian Labour Congress, Unifor, Teamsters, UFCW, and CUPE. Mandate covers skills training, algorithmic transparency, workplace AI use, and human-in-the-loop requirements.
The Council reads like the federal answer to the worker-side concerns now coming to a head, including the La Presse telco accent-masking story above. Whether it has teeth is the next question.
📊 Data & Reports
Canadian VCs at the NACO Summit can’t decide if we’re in an AI bubble. Maybe because both are true (BetaKit, May 5).
Panel featured Zeeshan Ali of Wittington Ventures, Udit Bhatnagar of McRock Capital, and Neha Khera of IRV Fund. Disagreement on the bubble call, but agreement that circular financing among hyperscalers and frontier labs “is not mathing.”
My take: they can’t decide because both are true. There’s a bubble and there’s a generational platform shift. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. The dotcom-era investors who said “this is a bubble” were right. The dotcom-era investors who said “the internet changes everything” were also right. The ones who got rich said both, and timed it.
📰 In Brief
Chips North Executive Summit convened ~250 invitation-only execs, government, researchers, and a German delegation in Ottawa May 4 and 5. The backdrop for Neuron IP’s startup award and Solomon’s policy press.
Vass Bednar on why Canada risks remaining a “digital 51st state.” Q&A in BetaKit, May 11. Canadian Shield Institute leader on digital sovereignty heading into the CUSMA review. Strong companion read to the Telus and OpenAI stories above.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne at the Payments Canada Summit (BetaKit, May 6) frames AI-era fraud as “an economic security, and almost national security, issue.” AI-fraud rhetoric is now at the finance-minister level, not just OPC briefings.
Fonds de solidarité FTQ licenses “Jolt Ninja,” a French AI tool, to source tech investments (La Presse, May 7). Built by Paris-based Jolt Capital, not FTQ. Launched at Jolt Capital’s new Montreal office opening. 400+ orgs already use it including Japan and Korea sovereign funds. FTQ first VP Dany Pelletier: “L’IA de Jolt est d’une grande maturité.” AI as a deal-sourcing tool for institutional Canadian capital, with a French AI tool’s Canadian beachhead via Quebec’s $20B+ labour-sponsored fund. (Disclaimer: Fonds de solidarité FTQ is an investor)
📣 Me IRL: Where I’ll be during Toronto Tech Week
A “2-person AI unicorn.” Sam Altman floated the idea, half of X dunked on it, the other half started pitch decks. So I’m hosting a breakfast panel during Toronto Tech Week to actually argue about it.
Joining me:
Marc Gingras, Founder, Bloks. 2x acquired. Now building AI-native from scratch.
Cato Pastoll, Founder, Loop Financial. Running a scaled company in the middle of the AI rewrite.
Tammer Kamel, GP, Antler Canada. Exited founder of Quandl.
Two operators (one starting over with AI in hand, one adapting a scaled business). Two investors. One question: is this real, or are we just compressing the same old curve and calling it new?
Tuesday, May 26 10-11:30 AM · https://luma.com/u2kjub55
📅 Upcoming Events
Upper Bound (Edmonton) — May 19–22, 2026 (Sold out. 8,000+ attendees.)
Canadian AI Conference 2026 (Vancouver) — May 25–29, 2026
ALL IN Toronto — May 28, 2026
ALL IN Main Event (Montréal) — September 16–17, 2026
Thanks for reading. If a story moved or a take landed, hit reply and tell me. If something didn’t, tell me that too. This all gets better when you push back 🙏🏽
See you next Tuesday.
— Raif Barbaros