Homegrown firms are selling world-class solutions to foreign governments and Fortune 500 companies, while slow adoption and self-imposed limits means the province risks missing the AI revolution being built in its own backyard.

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.

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