The Economic Geography of Canada's AI Ecosystem

Canada's artificial intelligence (AI) sector is receiving significant interest and investment from governments across Canada. These investments target emerging clusters of AI startups across the country and follow an expectation that AI will have substantial economic and societal impacts as a general-purpose technology. However, to secure venture capital, these startups become subjects of global financial networks, dictating their development trajectory. This project investigates Canada's AI ecosystem's financialization dynamics within the context of global financial networks and their interplay with the spatial distribution of the AI startups' agglomeration effects. By adopting a mixed-methods approach that included constructing a database, interviews, and policy analysis, I found that the Government of Canada has facilitated the ecosystem's growth, but it has not internalized the benefits of its investments successfully. Furthermore, while Canadian AI clusters have developed distinct entrepreneurial atmospheres from each other, they commonly rely on foreign investments and markets, especially from the US.