Canada\u2019s Semiconductor Council wants federal AI strategy to include dedicated semiconductor plan.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An industry group is asking the federal government to create a seventh pillar in the national AI strategy<\/a> to support Canada\u2019s semiconductor industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n The news: Canada\u2019s Semiconductor Council (CSC), which represents almost 60 Canadian semiconductor companies, has submitted a position paper to the federal government titled Sovereign AI Needs Sovereign Silicon.<\/p>\n The position paper broadly praises the government\u2019s AI strategy, but argues it\u2019s missing a key piece. It suggests that scoping out a semiconductor-focused pillar would give Canada\u2019s semiconductor industry \u201ca clear place to plug in\u201d to the strategy with no need for additional funding programs by doing things like setting targets and directing procurement and capital.<\/p>\n From the source: CSC managing director Paul Slaby told BetaKit that there are lots of positives in the strategy, \u201cbut what\u2019s missing is that recognition that AI is built on hardware infrastructure, and what\u2019s underpinning everything there is semiconductors.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe government position is correct, in terms of \u2018no sovereign AI without sovereign compute,\u2019 but what we want to say is \u2018there\u2019s no solving compute without a domestic capability in semiconductors,\u2019\u201d he added. Slaby said that the position paper has already been submitted to the government and received a \u201cvery positive response\u201d from the deputy minister of AI, Mark Schaan, which he hopes opens a door for a discussion he\u2019s feeling optimistic about.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Following the thread: As Canada builds out its sovereign compute capability with data centres on home soil, those facilities tend to run on foreign-made chips<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The CSC\u2019s position paper puts forward five asks to improve Canada\u2019s domestic choices on the hardware side, including a Canadian-content plan for the sovereign compute buildout, appending hardware on-ramps for some of the programs established in the AI strategy, and adding semiconductor talent to the strategy\u2019s AI workforce policies.\u00a0<\/p>\n Final thought: Industry leaders, including the CSC, have long asked the government to carve out a national semiconductor strategy<\/a>. However, AI Minister Evan Solomon told BetaKit in May<\/a> that he is not pursuing a standalone strategy, so folding semiconductors into the national AI strategy may be the next best option.\u00a0<\/p>\n Feature image courtesy Unsplash<\/a>. Photo by Alexandre Debi\u00e8ve<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada\u2019s Semiconductor Council wants federal AI strategy to include dedicated semiconductor plan.
An industry group is asking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[32124,17,17501,3150,3841,2183,47481,17500,14504],"class_list":["post-145550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-briefs","tag-canada","tag-canadas-semiconductor-council","tag-evan-solomon","tag-govt","tag-hardware","tag-mark-schaan","tag-paul-slaby","tag-semiconductors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}