OpenAI managing director George Osborne said at the ALL IN conference in Montréal on Wednesday that Canada is an “obvious place” for the company to look for its own data centre project, in conversation with Bloomberg AI reporter Rachel Metz. Osborne praised the Canadian government’s efforts to solicit international investment and complimented Prime Minister Mark Carney for the National AI Strategy’s focus on adoption. He said data centres are long-term and costly projects, so OpenAI needs to be sure they’re placed in stable jurisdictions with a predictable future, adding, “We haven’t made any decisions, but Canada would be an obvious place to look,” citing a stable jurisdiction, energy, and a can-do attitude. Osborne, a former British finance minister, joined OpenAI late last year as head of OpenAI for Countries, a division meant to help governments outside the United States develop AI infrastructure, including data centres. His comments follow OpenAI signing onto the federal government’s non-binding data centre development framework, alongside nearly two dozen other hyperscalers, earlier this month. This week, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told attendees at the Canadian Global Growth Forum on Monday that Canada has the potential to become a superpower in data centres thanks to its climate, landmass, and energy. On Monday, Bell announced its intention to quadruple the planned compute capacity of its data centre development in Saskatchewan, a roughly $50-billion project putting it on track to manage Canada’s largest data centre.