Canada’s Biggest AI Gathering Pulls OpenAI, Nvidia and Cohere Leaders Into Montreal as Tech Sovereignty Race Heats Up

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Montreal is about to become a test case for how Canada wants to compete in the next phase of artificial intelligence. On August 19, organizers of ALL IN 2026 unveiled a program expected to bring more than 7,500 participants from over 40 countries to the Palais des congrès de Montréal on September 16 and 17. The lineup spans global technology companies, Canadian AI champions, researchers, investors and senior public officials, including figures from OpenAI, Nvidia, Cohere, Google DeepMind and Mistral AI.

The timing is significant. Canada is no longer debating only how to produce world-class AI research; Ottawa is increasingly focused on who owns the infrastructure, where data and intellectual property reside, which companies scale at home, and which allies Canada relies on. ALL IN is becoming a stage where those questions move from policy documents into business negotiations.

ALL IN Has Grown Into a National AI Showcase

The scale of ALL IN has changed quickly. Its 2024 edition drew more than 4,000 participants from over 40 countries. In 2025, attendance climbed to nearly 6,500, with about 2,500 companies represented. For 2026, organizers now expect more than 7,500 leaders, researchers, policymakers and investors, alongside more than 260 speakers across four stages. That trajectory helps explain why the Montreal gathering increasingly looks less like a specialist technology conference and more like a marketplace for capital, customers, talent and public policy.

The format has expanded with the crowd. Organizers say the 2026 program will include Canada’s Top 100 AI Startups, infrastructure and quantum pavilions, workshops, roundtables, AI challenges and ecosystem tours. More than 330 Canadian companies applied for the startup showcase alone. For a founder trying to land a first major enterprise buyer, or an established company trying to choose an AI supplier, those encounters can matter as much as a keynote. The gathering’s growing size is therefore important not simply as an attendance record, but as evidence that Canadian AI commercialization is becoming a larger economic event.

The Speaker List Puts Frontier AI and Policy in the Same Room

The marquee names reveal how broad the AI competition has become. Aidan Gomez, chief executive and co-founder of Cohere, and Cohere chief AI officer Joelle Pineau are on the program. Nvidia is represented by Calista Redmond, vice-president of global initiatives, while George Osborne, managing director and head of OpenAI for Countries, is also listed among the headline speakers. Other names include Google DeepMind senior director Tulsee Doshi, Mistral AI chief revenue officer Marjorie Janiewicz, Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio.

That mix matters because the agenda is not confined to model performance. ALL IN’s five official tracks cover AI and society, enterprise transformation, frontier research, data and infrastructure, and physical AI and robotics. Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, is also scheduled to speak. In practical terms, the same venue will contain companies selling computing technology, organizations building models, enterprises deciding what to deploy and governments deciding what they want to protect. It is a useful snapshot of where the AI economy has moved: technical capability, industrial policy and national strategy are increasingly intertwined.

Sovereignty Is No Longer a Side Issue

Canada’s current AI policy gives the word “sovereignty” unusually concrete meaning. The federal government’s AI for All strategy, launched in June 2026, says Canada needs domestic control over critical foundations such as compute, cloud, connectivity, data and talent. It also calls for government procurement to help anchor Canadian AI companies and for closer technology partnerships with trusted allies. The strategy explicitly frames foreign control over important parts of the AI ecosystem as an economic and strategic risk.

That makes the Montreal program especially timely. An AI system may be developed by a Canadian team while relying on foreign chips, foreign cloud capacity, outside financing and customers abroad. Sovereignty, in that environment, is not simply about putting a maple leaf on a product. It is about retaining enough domestic capacity and bargaining power that Canadian firms, researchers and public institutions can make meaningful choices. The presence of OpenAI and Nvidia alongside Cohere, Mila, Canadian telecommunications companies and government officials captures that tension neatly: Canada needs access to global technology leaders, but it also wants more of the infrastructure, intellectual property, jobs and commercial value to remain at home.

Compute Is Becoming Canada’s Strategic Bottleneck

The sovereignty debate becomes tangible when it reaches computing power. Canada’s Sovereign AI Compute Strategy was built around $2 billion in federal support for domestic compute capacity and access. Its components include a $300 million AI Compute Access Fund for smaller companies, support for Canadian AI champions and investment in large-scale public computing infrastructure. In May 2026, Ottawa said 44 projects had been approved for $66 million from the access fund, covering sectors from health care and energy to agriculture, manufacturing and transportation.

The government has also launched a program aimed at developing large-scale, Canadian-based AI supercomputing infrastructure. That reflects a basic reality of modern AI: talent can be abundant while access to advanced processors remains scarce and expensive. For a startup, the difference between an impressive research prototype and a commercial product can be the ability to pay for sustained training and inference. It is why an infrastructure track at ALL IN carries more weight than it might have a few years ago. Discussions about chips, data centres, energy and cloud services are now discussions about which companies can build at scale—and where the resulting economic value accumulates.

Montreal Is Trying to Convert Research Prestige Into Economic Power

Montreal enters this moment with an unusually deep research base. Mila, the Quebec AI institute founded by Yoshua Bengio, describes itself as the world’s largest academic research centre specializing in deep learning and says its community includes more than 1,400 researchers. The city’s long association with foundational machine-learning research gives ALL IN a natural backdrop: many of the ideas now driving the global AI boom have intellectual roots in Canadian universities and research institutes.

The harder question is whether research strength can reliably produce companies that remain and scale in Canada. A January 2026 analysis from Mila and Bain estimated that Canada hosts about 10% of the world’s top AI researchers but captured less than 2% of global AI venture investment in 2024. It also found that two-thirds of high-potential Canadian-led startups that raised more than $1 million that year were headquartered outside Canada. Those figures explain the urgency behind the event’s investor meetings, startup zone and commercialization focus. Montreal does not need to prove it can generate AI expertise; the challenge is converting more of that expertise into durable Canadian firms, headquarters, intellectual property and high-value employment.

Cohere Embodies the Canadian-Champion Test

Cohere’s prominence at ALL IN gives the sovereignty debate a recognizable corporate face. The Toronto-based company has positioned itself around enterprise AI, particularly private and customized deployments for organizations that care about security and control. Reuters reported in 2025 that roughly 85% of Cohere’s business came from private deployments, and the company’s focus has made it a prominent Canadian competitor in a market filled with much larger global technology groups. Aidan Gomez’s appearance in Montreal therefore carries significance beyond another founder keynote.

Ottawa has already treated Cohere as a strategically important domestic company. The federal government previously announced support of up to $240 million tied to expanding AI compute capacity in Canada, and its broader AI strategy now emphasizes scaling Canadian champions through capital, procurement and infrastructure. The policy logic is straightforward: producing leading researchers is not enough if the most valuable companies, computing contracts and intellectual property ultimately migrate elsewhere. Cohere’s trajectory will be watched as a test of whether Canada can support a globally competitive AI company without isolating it from the international customers, investors and chip suppliers it needs to grow.

Germany’s Role Shows Sovereignty Does Not Mean Isolation

Germany’s designation as ALL IN 2026’s Country of Honour is one of the clearest signs that Canada is defining technological sovereignty through alliances rather than self-sufficiency. Canada and Germany launched a Sovereign Technology Alliance in February after creating a bilateral Digital Alliance in late 2025. Their cooperation is intended to expand secure compute capacity, deepen research and commercialization links, develop talent and reduce strategic technology dependencies. Organizers say more than 50 German business leaders are expected in Montreal.

That approach reflects the economics of AI. Very few countries can independently supply the chips, cloud infrastructure, energy, research talent, capital and markets required across the full technology stack. Canada’s strategy therefore combines a desire for more domestic capacity with a network of trusted international partnerships. Germany is particularly relevant because it brings industrial depth in manufacturing and engineering, while Canada brings research talent, energy resources and a growing AI ecosystem. If the alliance produces joint investment, customers or infrastructure rather than only diplomatic statements, Montreal could become a useful meeting ground for a more networked version of sovereignty—one built on reducing risky dependencies without cutting Canada off from global scale.

The Real Test Is Whether Canadian Organizations Use the Technology

The biggest economic question hanging over ALL IN is not whether Canada can attract famous AI leaders. It is whether Canadian organizations can turn the technology into measurable productivity and growth. Statistics Canada reported that 19.2% of businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the 12 months preceding the second quarter of 2026, up from 12.2% a year earlier. That is rapid growth, but it still means most businesses are not yet using AI directly in production or service delivery.

Ottawa’s AI for All strategy is built around closing that gap. It targets AI adoption of 60% by 2034 and sets an ambition of generating an additional $200 billion in economic growth and 250,000 AI-related jobs over five years. Those are policy targets, not guaranteed outcomes, and they put pressure on events like ALL IN to produce more than visibility. The practical payoff will come from contracts signed, systems deployed, workers trained and Canadian companies scaled. Trust will matter too: the federal strategy couples adoption with privacy, transparency and AI-safety measures. In that sense, the race for sovereignty is ultimately a race to make AI useful enough, safe enough and accessible enough that Canadian institutions actually choose to build with it.

Why This Montreal Gathering Matters Beyond Two Days

ALL IN 2026 arrives at a moment when Canada’s AI identity is being rewritten. For years, the country’s strongest claim was scientific: pioneering researchers, respected institutes and a deep talent pool. The new policy ambition is broader. Canada wants sovereign computing capacity, stronger domestic companies, faster business adoption, trusted international partners and safety rules that can support public confidence rather than slow deployment through uncertainty.

That is why the combination of OpenAI, Nvidia, Cohere, Mila, government ministers, investors and more than 100 showcased startups deserves attention. These groups represent different layers of the same competitive problem. Nvidia sits at a crucial part of the hardware ecosystem; model companies shape the software layer; researchers push the frontier; governments influence infrastructure and procurement; enterprises decide whether any of it becomes economically useful. Montreal will not settle Canada’s AI sovereignty debate in two days. But it will concentrate many of the people who can determine the outcome in one place—and make clear whether Canada is becoming a market that mainly consumes the next AI wave or one that owns a meaningful share of it.

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