Accelerate your AI innovation with TELUS.
Sovereign. Powerful. Secure.
TELUS and L-SPARK announced a first-of-its-kind program designed to enable high-potential Canadian startups and scaleups to build, train and deploy advanced AI solutions on Canada’s fastest and most powerful sovereign AI supercomputer. The TELUS Sovereign AI Accelerator will usher in a new wave of Canadian innovation by accelerating the go-to-market strategies and investment readiness of select businesses.
Participating companies will receive compute credits from the TELUS AI Factory – powered by 99% renewable energy and NVIDIA platform – alongside one-on-one guidance from seasoned L-SPARK executive advisors. The six-month engagement is designed to fast-track product development, unlock new customer relationships and build the investor networks critical to long-term success, all while maintaining complete control over data and intellectual property.
The initiative underscores TELUS and L-SPARK’s shared commitment to strengthen Canada’s AI ecosystem by enabling founders to build and scale transformative technologies – securely, responsibly and domestically.
"Canada has no shortage of talented AI visionaries and founders, but too often they lack the coordinated support needed to scale from promising ideas to globally-competitive businesses. The TELUS Sovereign AI Accelerator demolishes those barriers. By arming founders with the same high-performance AI infrastructure available to tech giants – combined with hands-on advisory support – we’re enabling them to accelerate development, strengthen their market position and build AI companies that dominate the world stage, right here in Canada."
Key Benefits
Secure AI deployment in Canada
AI-powered innovation and growth
Eco-smart AI computing
FAQs about the TELUS Sovereign AI Accelerator
What sets TELUS' Sovereign AI Factory apart?
- Built for Developers, Optimized for AI: We provide a purpose-built environment designed to accelerate the end-to-end AI lifecycle, giving you control without the infrastructure headache.
- Instant Prototyping: Spin up Jupyter Notebooks immediately for rapid experimentation and model development.
- Production-Ready Inference: Leverage NVIDIA NIMs (Inference Microservices) to deploy optimized pre-built models or bring your own Open Source Software (OSS) models with one-click inference endpoints.
- Flexible Orchestration: Architect your way with support for both Virtual Machines (VMs) and managed Kubernetes clusters, allowing for scalable training jobs.
- Eliminate I/O Bottlenecks: Keep your GPUs fed with WEKA high-speed NVMe storage, specifically engineered to handle the massive throughput required for training large models.
- Massive Compute Density: Access NVIDIA H200 GPUs interconnected with NVIDIA InfiniBand networking for ultra-low latency distributed training.
Who is this accelerator for?
AI startups and scaleups building compute-intensive products that need reliable GPU availability for:
- Training and fine-tuning foundation models and domain-specific models
- High-throughput inference for production deployments
- Large-scale experimentation, evaluation, and synthetic data generation
- Multi-tenant enterprise AI platforms and AI-native SaaS products
Applied research teams and developers who require reserved capacity for sustained work, including:
- University labs, research institutes, and consortia running long-duration training runs
- Developers creating advanced AI tools, agentic workflows, and enterprise RAG systems
- Teams working with sensitive datasets that must remain under Canadian jurisdiction
Are you prioritizing specific vertical markets?
The collaboration will prioritize organizations in regulated and mission-critical sectors where data residency, auditability, and Canadian legal jurisdiction are essential, including:
- Healthcare & Life Sciences: medical imaging, genomics, clinical decision support, drug discovery, patient operations
- Public Sector & Public Services: citizen services, program integrity, digital identity, secure AI modernization
- Financial Services & Insurance: fraud detection, risk and compliance analytics, sovereign AI copilots
- Critical Infrastructure & Utilities: grid optimization, predictive maintenance, outage forecasting, operational resilience
- Telecommunications & Network Intelligence: network optimization, security analytics, AI-enabled service assurance
- Cybersecurity & Digital Trust: threat detection, anomaly monitoring, secure AI operations for regulated environments
- Advanced Industry (manufacturing, logistics, resources): computer vision, robotics, planning optimization, digital twins
How do I get started?
Simply contact our team at info@l-spark.com to get started. We look forward to hearing from you!
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