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.
The big story this week is AMD’s acquisition of Taalas, the Toronto startup that hardwires AI models into silicon, announced August 6 for undisclosed terms. Also this week: Cohere set up a standalone APAC headquarters in Seoul, Shopify posted 34% revenue growth, and TELUS took a $2.1B impairment it partly pins on AI. Plus Alberta’s new pitch that data centres are digital refineries, and a record month for AI-hardware imports. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Taalas (Toronto) agreed to be acquired by AMD on August 6; terms were not disclosed.
Taalas etches a model’s weights directly into custom silicon for inference. Founded in 2023 by Tenstorrent co-founder Ljubisa Bajic with Lejla Bajic and Drago Ignatovic, it raised US$169M this February from Quiet Capital, Fidelity, and Pierre Lamond.
AMD plans to pair the technology with its Instinct GPUs and Helios rack systems, and its release cites “a continued commitment to retaining and growing Canadian talent.” Closing is expected in Q4, subject to regulatory approval.
It is the second Toronto AI-chip company to draw US acquirer interest this summer, after the Qualcomm interest in Tenstorrent that Jim Keller denied in June.
Intellistake (Vancouver) signed a definitive agreement to acquire NanoAi Technologies of Dallas for roughly C$17M in stock, announced August 4.
NanoAi makes portable devices that detect airborne threats at standoff distance; Intellistake plans to fuse the sensor data with its AI data infrastructure for defence, law enforcement, and healthcare customers.
The CSE-listed company is pitching data centres located outside CLOUD Act jurisdiction as part of the offer. The shares carry performance-based vesting milestones.
TetraGen Robotics (Winnipeg) raised a $1.8M oversubscribed seed round led by Calgary’s StepChange Capital.
Founder Matt Khoshdarregi previously ran the University of Manitoba’s Intelligent Digital Manufacturing Lab. The robots pair 3D vision with AI software to weld without manual programming; Vancouver’s Emend Vision Fund and Jim Richardson of James Richardson & Sons also participated.
Good to see an oversubscribed robotics round land in Winnipeg.
Transformer Lab (Kitchener-Waterloo) launched Primus, an autonomous research tool, on August 10.
The four-person company, founded by Well.ca and Tulip founder Ali Asaria, says Primus produced 30 research papers in 30 days, one of which was cited by Google DeepMind. Access is free to start and rolling out from a waitlist as compute allows.
Calogy (Sherbrooke) won a $1.2M contract to design the battery and thermal system for Jaunt Air Mobility’s next-generation autonomous aircraft.
Calogy’s contribution is the thermal hardware; the autonomy stack is Jaunt’s.
Claryx raised a US$3.5M pre-seed round led by New York’s Outlander VC to detect hospital pathogen outbreaks before they spread.
The CloneLink platform sequences pathogen genomes from confirmed infections and links scattered cases into outbreaks. Founders Dirk and Kurt Hackenberger are Ontarians who built the company in New York, citing simpler sales into private hospital systems.
🏢 Large Companies
Cohere (Toronto) announced a standalone APAC headquarters in Seoul on August 5, with subsidiaries in Korea and Japan planned by year-end. (Disclosure: Cohere is a Mistral Venture Partners portfolio company.)
The company plans to double its APAC technical and sales headcount by year-end and grow the regional business fourfold by the end of 2027. The anchor partner is LG CNS, building Korean-language, finance-specialized agents on Cohere’s North platform.
Cohere opened its first Seoul office in July 2025; this upgrades the city to regional headquarters. Korean coverage also cited a 1-trillion-parameter Command A Plus model planned for the second half of 2026.
Shopify (Ottawa) reported Q2 revenue of US$3.58B, up 34%, with GMV up 32% to US$115.6B, on August 5.
On the earnings call, the company said AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores each tripled year over year, and Sidekick handled about 34 million conversations with daily active use up 3.6x. Shares rose about 18% on the day.
TELUS (Vancouver) took a $2.1B pre-tax impairment on TELUS Digital in its July 31 Q2 results, driven partly by hyperscale clients using AI to automate the legacy services the unit sells.
The same report raised full-year capex to about $2.6B, with part of the increase going to its sovereign AI data centres. The Rimouski facility is sold out, and the Kamloops site is slated to come online later this year.
🔬 Research
Luis Mantilla Calderon and Alán Aspuru-Guzik of the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute posted “How Molecular Generative Models Organize Molecular Identity” (arXiv, August 7).
The paper analyzes how three generative architectures internally arrange discrete chemical identities, an interpretability question for AI-driven molecule design.
🏛️ Policy
Alberta launched a public website this week making the province’s case for AI data centres, built around one line: “Think of them as digital refineries.”
The chain it describes: natural gas becomes electricity, electricity becomes computing, computing becomes intelligence. Citing energy economist Peter Tertzakian, the site claims the chain multiplies the value of a gigajoule of gas about 1,000 times, versus roughly 4x for refining oil into kerosene and 9x for turning gas into fertilizer.
Four commitments anchor the pitch: no public subsidies, grid reliability first, licensed water use, and a levy of up to 2% on data-centre computing equipment. The featured project is Meta’s $13B Sturgeon County campus, announced July 8.
It is the most coherent case any Canadian government has made for hosting the buildout.
Mode40 (Winnipeg) and Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters launched AeroTrace, a Prairies-wide program to demonstrate AI systems in aerospace, aviation, and defence manufacturing, announced August 4.
Nine manufacturers, three each from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, will run funded AI implementation projects, with each project financed one-third by Mode40, one-third by CME through third-party funding, and one-third by the manufacturer.
📊 Data
Statistics Canada reported that June imports of computers and peripherals jumped 59% to a record high, in trade data released August 4.
StatCan attributes the surge to processing units “of the type used in data centres” coming from the US, and puts first-half imports in the category up 36.7% over the same period in 2025. The Globe and Mail’s Jason Kirby read the data as the first hard evidence the Canadian data-centre buildout is underway.
📰 In brief
Sanja Fidler, the U of T professor and Vector Institute co-founder, is leaving Nvidia after eight years as VP of AI research, announced in a July 31 LinkedIn post. She built Nvidia’s Toronto lab from employee one to more than 80 people and says world models are “where the next breakthrough lies.” Her next move is undisclosed.
BetaKit asked whether the AI “techlash” has reached Canada, citing data-centre protest posters in Calgary and a twice-vandalized automated bakery in Montréal.
Max Power is using an AI geological platform to scale exploration at its Lawson natural-hydrogen site in southern Saskatchewan, after drilling Canada’s first well dedicated to natural hydrogen.
Mila hosted its second Indigenous AI Gathering on August 5, with more than 45 speakers and student-built projects from its Indigenous Pathfinders in AI program.
SAAS NORTH AI and Dominion Dynamics launched Deploy, a new Ottawa summit for founders expanding into dual-use and defence markets.
Thank you for reading! Subscribe, and please share any feedback 🙏🏽
— Raif
Also, as a holder of TSE:T, fingers crossed that they can get their act together......
"It is the most coherent case any Canadian government has made for hosting the buildout."
Yes, assuming you can get turbines (and continue to ignore the rising costs of climate change).
CCGT, or even Brayton cycle plants are as rare as hens teeth these days thanks to data centre build-outs elsewhere. source: https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs-backlog-extends-to-2031/
I'm not anti natgas, it has a place for peak shaving and backup, and it is cleaner than coal - but the backlog is real. Ironically, we'd be better off building out batteries, solar and wind, where the returns would likely be even higher.
It turns out data center load use can be noisy (source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.21783); and spinning mass generators (natgas, nuclear, hydro) aren't particularly good at handling that. So, batteries are a good investment not only for backup but also for peak shaving. GPUs can be hitting the battery as a buffer meaning that actual generation doesn't need to try to follow all the ups and downs, instead it has a nice smooth load of the battery charging itself as needed.
So, all in all, agree with the argument! But maybe not for the reasons Alberta politicians might want.