Digital Research Alliance of Canada and EPCC sign agreement to grow collaboration

In early November the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC) and EPCC signed a formal memorandum of understanding to enable closer collaboration between the two organisations, focused on the delivery of large scale compute for research.

The ‘UK-Canada cooperation in AI compute’ identified four key areas for engagement between the UK and Canada:

• Access to AI computing capacity: exploring opportunities to support researchers and industry with the secure and affordable access to the compute capacity needed to use and train AI systems
• Sustainability in compute infrastructure: exploring joint opportunities and meaningful ways to reduce the environmental impacts of computing infrastructure
• Collaborative AI research projects: examining opportunities for collaborations on areas of shared strategic importance such as climate research and biomedicine
• Development of AI talent: sharing information on initiatives related to skills development and advanced AI training that can accelerate workforce development.

Together, the organisations will focus on a range of topics that transects all four of these areas of engagement, with the focus on the effective delivery of large-scale compute infrastructure to inform national approaches, including researcher and industry access models, scheduler optimisation, and secure data environments. In doing this, provide the opportunity for members of both organisations to participate in review committees, expert panels and similar bodies, and explore knowledge exchange on sustainable data centre operations.

Ritchie Somerville, Deputy Director at EPCC, welcomes this opportunity: “This collaboration has come after 18 months of productive engagement in support of the UK-Canada cooperation work. We quickly identified several topics where we could learn from each other’s approaches, and it is fantastic to now be able to progress this work with a programme of knowledge exchange in 2026. We are really looking forward to what we can learn from DRAC and the knowledge we can share with them."

“Expanding the scope of our work together allows us to share expertise and experience and develop new approaches to tackle common challenges and identify opportunities based on our shared values and interests,” said David Tweddell, Interim Vice President, Strategy and Planning at DRAC. “This builds on what we have accomplished over the last 18 months and will allow us to inform national approaches to effectively deliver on compute and AI infrastructure for both Canada and the UK.”

Further information

UK-Canada cooperation in AI compute: memorandum of understanding