Alberta wants to be a model for how the public sector and other large organizations employ AI, and host the compute capacity that powers it, Technology Minister Nate Glubish says. 

Over the last 18 months, provincial staff have used in-house tools built on top of commercially available AI models to scan all the code in its software systems for security vulnerabilities, check which applications need upgrading and develop some of the replacements.

“We have built an entire army of AI agents,” Glubish told The Logic. His team also developed the layers of code that sit between those automated assistants and the models that power them, letting them access necessary information and make changes to other software systems. 

Glubish’s ministry manages all of the Alberta government’s technology systems outside of health care. The result of its scanning project, he says, is the first comprehensive overview of the state of the public service’s technology systems, some of which are decades old and had never been properly documented. 

The province estimates fixing them up would normally cost about $2 billion and take a century. Using its tools, it says, it can complete the work for five per cent of the cost in just four years.

For example, the tech team built the infrastructure department a new system to manage provincial properties like hospitals and schools over 10 months, at a cost of $2.5 million. “They were doing it on Excel, and it was not scalable,” Glubish said. His ministry decided to take it on after the department got a $52-million, three-year quote from an IT consulting firm. The system developed in-house is now up and running, with plans for more features. 

On Monday, the province published 21 “white papers” detailing its AI projects. It also open sourced the code for its tools. “This is the evidence that we have to say it’s not just aspirational—we are doing it,” Glubish said. He suggested the published materials can inspire other governments as well as companies to copy and remix the tools Alberta has built for its own needs. 

Alberta’s new AI applications run on Anthropic’s commercially available Claude Opus and Sonnet models. In a blog post, the San Francisco-based firm said the province’s work is an example of how government departments can use its technology “to secure their systems at a large scale.” 

Alberta is also promising procurements. In January, the province requested information from companies on the compute and tools they have to sell, specifically looking for “domestically controlled software, AI models and platforms.”

Canadian companies, researchers, citizens and governments at all levels are currently “very dependent” on AI infrastructure that’s located or controlled from the U.S., Glubish said. That leaves their data and IP subject to U.S. law.

Canada needs its own technology stack of hardware and software located and controlled within its borders, he said. “That’s why we want to become the compute capital of Canada.” 

Alberta has touted its natural gas as the right fuel to power AI infrastructure. Glubish initially took that message to Silicon Valley, selling tech giants on building their data centres in the province. On Wednesday, Meta announced plans for a $13-billion, one-gigawatt compute facility outside Edmonton, to be powered by a natural-gas power plant built by Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline.

Alberta also wants to encourage the development of AI infrastructure that’s domestically owned and controlled, according to Glubish. The province will “vote with our wallet,” he said. “For our own compute workloads, we intend to be a customer of sovereign compute capacity.”

The province is still determining its specific requirements, Glubish said. Canadian AI players like AltaML Bell, Cohere and Denvr have all expressed interest in selling to it, as have U.S. tech giants like Cisco, Dell and Google.

The federal government’s new national AI strategy also promises to use its buying power to spur the development of homegrown data centres. Alberta’s deal with Ottawa, headlined by a new pipeline to the West Coast, cites co-operation on sovereign cloud as one of its objectives. Glubish said he’s in ongoing discussions with federal counterparts AI Minister Evan Solomon and Procurement Minister Joël Lightbound.