I'm Canadian and I built DigitalOcean, there is a data center in Toronto because I decided. I am one of many Canadians who have built scaled infrastructure and think this is a nightmare. Many competent people at telus and bell behind the scenes believe it or not. They should have, and still should, form a crown corp and get a bunch of us older infrastructure people to help put it together. We have crown corps for this very purpose, from my understanding the people in the rooms calling the shots had little to no experience architecting large scale physical data center build outs. Cohere, or any startups should be stakeholders, but the infra should have been home grown.

I'm not opposed to CrownCorps and regulated energy markets. The most recent rumblings in the US clamor for govt. infra stepin to compete with China on power/permitting intervention. Makes sense.

That said, Cohere only got a couple hundred million from CA and the DC is being built "domestic" in CA.

That's not enough?

Sounds like you're knowledgeable about the skills gap of do-ers in CA govt, but I'd be concerned about wasting even more time/$ through incompetence. And a politician would be staked on its outcome. That's too much political risk.

What crown corps do you currently think are being run incompetently??

I would love to hear your (and others) opinions.

I don't have a good idea of what happened inside or what they could have done differently, but I do remember them going from a world-leading LLM AI lab to selling embeddings to enterprise.