Who is the Digital Research Alliance of Canada?

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC) integrates, supports and improves access to digital research infrastructure (DRI) to deliver world-class digital tools and services for Canada’s researchers.​

  • Public sector not-for-profit corporation established by the federal government in 2019, and federally funded through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED).
  • More than 120 members – universities, institutions, and research hospitals across Canada.
  • We support 26,000 researchers in a variety of disciplines across Canada with access to high-performance computing and data resources.
  • We support a national DRI workforce of +230 distributed support staff across the country, all working with universities, colleges and research institutes.
  • We are publicly funded and, to date, we have invested ~$500M in upgrades and new public infrastructure across five national supercomputer systems.

Our Vision for Sovereign AI Compute

  • Empower all Canadian researchers with equitable access to compute, data, tools, and training through the Alliance’s national mandate.
  • Drive collaboration and innovation with a technology testbed that connects academia, government and business.
  • One AI compute facility to maximize public compute capacity and scale innovation.
  • Protect Canada’s digital sovereignty by building publicly-owned infrastructure—keeping Canadian data and research off foreign clouds and in Canadian hands.
  • Connect national-scale infrastructure, services, training and support to seamlessly and consistently serve researchers across the country.

Our ProposalKey Facts

AI-Enabled Research in Action

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