Vancouver’s Wafr Technologies is betting that Canada can become a global leader in sustainable artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The B.C.-based company announced this week that it plans to develop an artificial intelligence research lab in Canada, while also advancing a $300 million fundraising campaign to commercialize its cooling technology for AI data centres.
Wafr says it has raised $100 million toward that goal.
The investment will support the creation of the AI research lab, expand the company’s research and development efforts, and help commercialize Canadian-made technology designed to reduce the environmental impact of AI infrastructure.
The company is targeting one of the fastest-growing challenges in the AI economy: how to cool the data centres required to train and run increasingly powerful models without placing more pressure on energy grids and water systems.
“Artificial intelligence represents one of the greatest advancements of our generation but we don’t want it to come at an environmental cost to future generations,” said Bikram Singh, co-founder and CEO of Wafr Technologies. “Our vision is to build a globally recognized AI research lab in Canada and be a leader in how we can reduce the impact to water and energy.”
According to Wafr, typical data centres can use up to 10 million litres of water per megawatt annually, with cooling accounting for 30 to 45 per cent of total electricity load. The company says its proprietary technology can reduce water use by up to 95 per cent and cooling power use by up to 80 per cent.
Wafr describes its platform as closed-loop cooling infrastructure built for AI workloads operating within fixed power and water limits. Its system is designed to store, dispatch, and optimize cooling capacity for high-density computing environments.
The company says the new research lab will bring together researchers, engineers, and industry partners to develop next-generation AI infrastructure technologies in Canada.
“Our technology demonstrates that economic growth and environmental stewardship are not competing priorities,” said Wafr co-founder Darrell Kopke. “Canada has an opportunity to lead the world in sustainable AI, and we’re building the technology to make that possible.”
The announcement arrives as Canada looks to strengthen its domestic AI ecosystem beyond software, talent, and model development. As global demand for computing power accelerates, infrastructure has become a strategic priority for governments, cloud providers, and AI companies alike.
For Wafr, that creates an opening to position cooling technology as a critical layer of the AI economy.
The company says its work has been demonstrated in India and Dubai and that its Canadian research lab will help accelerate commercialization at a time when AI data centres are facing growing scrutiny over power consumption, water use, and long-term sustainability.
If successful, Wafr’s bet could give Vancouver a role in one of the defining infrastructure challenges of the AI era: building the compute capacity the world needs, without making the environmental cost impossible to ignore.
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