British Columbia is having its AI moment in the way it tends to handle new technology: not with a moonshot lab or a trillion-dollar model whirling in a frozen bunker, but with a swarm of more than 700 practical companies simply bolting machine learning onto real-world problems and then selling those solutions to the rest of the globe.
It’s an approach that has made B.C. quietly successful and increasingly anxious at the same time.
Founders describe a province caught between ambition and self-imposed limits, eager for AI-driven productivity and data sovereignty in a Trump-era world while rationing the electricity the emerging compute economy desperately needs.
Handol Kim, co-founder of Vancouver’s Variational AI, says B.C. is “strong in the creation of applied AI companies,” even if the big breakthroughs in model architecture tend to come from researchers elsewhere in Canada.
To understand how early this all still is, Kim suggests swapping “AI” for “internet” and imagining 1997, when Netscape ruled the browser wars and people tied up phone lines logging into AOL.
“The scale and the scope of the disruption is abstract until it happens,” he says. “This is Noah’s Ark. You are on it or you are dead. And I fear… that when it comes to AI, people in B.C. in general are slow to adopt.”
Kim’s thinking captures the conflicting emotions in B.C.’s tech sector: excitement at the immense opportunity of AI, mixed with anxiety the province will lag on adoption, allow talent to drift south and fail to utilize the work of local companies who will then sell their world-class tools everywhere except at home.
There are cases for that hiding in plain sight in B.C.
Variational is using generative AI to design molecules for drug discovery, chasing a global industry measured in the trillions. In 2025, Variational landed a deal potentially valued at $349 million (U.S.) with U.S. pharma giant Merck and Co. Inc. to run a customized version of its Enki platform trained on Merck’s proprietary drug data to identify new drug candidates.
It’s the kind of deal provincial officials like to cite as proof B.C. can compete globally. But it also subtly underscores how often its most valuable AI work is commercialized elsewhere.
In Victoria, Green Edge Computing Corp.—or GECCO—is building rugged, toaster-sized compute pods meant for the back rooms of businesses that could replace massive servers and unlock affordable, local AI computing power.
“We’re in conversations with no less than half a dozen national governments in the world who are all, for lack of a better term, scrambling in some way to define a sovereign AI and compute strategy that doesn’t require the building of many large and expensive data centres,” says co-founder Jeff MacMillan, who expects the company to triple in size in 2026. Ottawa is expressing some interest, but most clients are outside of Canada.
In the West Kootenay ski town of Rossland, ThoughtExchange is using AI to help American school districts and local governments analyze the human text that pours out of community engagement. The company says it helped a U.S. school district identify warning signs that let it intercept a gun on the way to a classroom.
“I’m B.C. born and raised myself. I wear a chip on my shoulder about this: I feel B.C. can and ought to be a place where world-class companies win and thrive and grow,” says CEO George Psiharis, whose company has 170 employees and a valuation in the hundreds of millions.
“I think that’s going to be how we reinvent our economy and drive economic growth in B.C. and Canada.” He adds: “We have to make a choice to stick it out here. It comes with pros and cons.”
The company’s biggest impact stories come from the U.S., not because the technology isn’t relevant in B.C., but because adoption of AI here remains slower. B.C. is partly boxed in on AI by government decisions.
Federal policy has largely positioned the province as a supplier of applied AI talent. Ottawa placed the country’s three main AI research hubs in Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal, and has effectively crowned Toronto-based Cohere Inc. as the country’s main large language AI model.
The B.C. government, meanwhile, squelched the expansion of massive AI data centres in 2026 with new electricity limits. The goal is to keep hydro rates low and power flowing to projects that produce more jobs, says Rick Glumac, B.C.’s minister of state for AI.
“It’s stupid,” counters Opposition BC Conservative tech critic Gavin Dew. “We are rationing electricity like wartime butter.”
The most successful countries pick a lane in the AI marketplace and drive it forward for a competitive advantage, says Psiharis.
AI founders largely agree on what would help: predictable and fast immigration pathways, retaining local graduates with incentives, reducing housing and living costs, tax incentives for venture capital, matchmaking companies to clients, breaking down procurement barriers and having governments lead by example in adopting local AI products.
Plus, stay out of the way and leave AI regulation to Ottawa.
“They should not be regulating AI at the provincial level,” says Jill Tipping, president of the BC Tech Association. “I don’t think they intend to, but you never know. That would be a really bad idea.”
B.C.’s goal is to double tech-sector employment to 400,000 people over the next decade, and it recently struck a K-12 AI advisory committee to look at altering the education curriculum for early AI learning.
“We’re at a very pivotal moment in time where AI is everywhere and we are in an inflection point kind of change between Canada having been a research country into being a country that needs to adopt [AI],” said Rob Goehring, executive director of the AI Network of BC.
The change drives fear of job losses, privacy breaches, stolen data, risk and financial failures. Federal AI minister Evan Solomon is trying to put in place AI frameworks to bolster public trust. But there’s only so much governments can do, says Variational AI’s Kim.
“It’s bigger than whole governments. It’s about a wholesale change in culture of Canada and British Columbia, and that’s beyond any bureaucrat’s paygrade,” he says.
The risk isn’t that AI will pass B.C. by, says Kim. It’s that B.C. companies will deploy their best ideas elsewhere, and the province will become a late adopter of what’s sitting in its own backyard.
“The biggest thing we can do, for any business owner large or small and anyone working in policy or regulation, is to adopt AI. Use it,” he says. “Do it when it’s a choice. And use that against other competing companies, before you are forced to adopt it to defend yourself.”
