At Google Cloud Next 25 in Las Vegas, Farsad Nasseri, Managing Director of Google Cloud Canada, reflected on how the company carved out its place in Canada’s competitive cloud market by choosing focus over scale—and how that strategy is paying off.
“Because we were third to market,” said Nasseri, “we had the luxury of stepping back and asking: how can we do this differently?”
While competitors rushed to onboard customers en masse, Google Cloud took a more deliberate route. In 2015, Nasseri became the company’s first Canadian hire and helped shape a go-to-market approach based on deep industry partnerships.
Google Cloud identified five anchor clients across key verticals—Shopify (tech), Scotiabank (banking), TELUS (telco), Loblaw (retail), and one in the public sector—to co-develop solutions tailored to Canadian needs.
“We invested deeply,” Nasseri said. “In fact, in the early days, we were ahead of even our U.S. teams in regulated industries because of what we learned from Canadian customers.”
That approach gave Google Cloud a foothold in industries that are typically slow to adopt cloud—like banking and telecom—and set the stage for broader adoption.
TELUS, for instance, developed Neo, an AI-powered tool that helps field technicians access manuals and guides in real time. Bell is using AI to predict and prevent network outages. And Canadian banks are leaning on Google Cloud to modernize customer service and strengthen fraud detection.
“AI has real applications in finance,” said Nasseri, citing anti-money laundering and call center automation as two high-priority use cases.
Another reason for Google Cloud’s momentum: its long-term investment in local infrastructure. The company now operates two Canadian regions (each with three availability zones) and offers customers the ability to run workloads locally—even in air-gapped environments—using Google Distributed Cloud Edge. In highly regulated industries, this level of data sovereignty matters.
“Encryption is standard now, but we go further,” Nasseri explained. “We let customers manage their own encryption keys, which means even if Google is compelled to turn over data, we can’t access it ourselves.”
Startups and scale-ups remain a priority too. Google Cloud was one of the first providers to offer cloud credits to early-stage companies and continues to support Canadian ventures through accelerator programs and infrastructure access—especially for those building with AI.
“We’re always looking for new ways to support the startup ecosystem,” Nasseri said. “From mentoring to compute power, there’s more coming.”
Nasseri also praised Canada’s rising tech stars, calling out companies like Clio, Geotab, and Shopify for leading with technical excellence and staying proudly Canadian. “The engineers at Shopify can go toe-to-toe with anyone in the Valley,” he said. “And they’ve stayed unapologetically Canadian. That’s something to be proud of.”
With fresh infrastructure announcements and growing demand for AI tools, Nasseri believes the next chapter of Google Cloud in Canada is just beginning.
“We made big moves this week,” he said. “And we’re just getting started.”
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