Has the AI "techlash" reached Canada? Plus: Google shakes up DeepMind. Last week, an automated bakery in Montréal was vandalized for the second time in recent months. The news: The words "action anti tech" were spray-painted on the business, which is run on a self-serve system and also uses AI in its advertising. On the store's social media post about the incident, many commenters spoke to their concerns with technology, and the bakery's use of it, rather than expressing sympathy over the incident. One post reads, "Although I prefer to boycott, I fundamentally can understand why your store was vandalized." From the source: "There is now something of what could be called a 'New Luddite' movement," writes Ariel Wittenberg for Politico. Wittenberg writes that anger over the harms caused by data centres and AI chatbots in the US, and unequal distribution of profits, is spurring a broader political movement against technology. The context: In the US, where data centres have a major contested presence, anti-tech sentiments have sometimes spilled into violence; a Molotov cocktail was recently tossed at Sam Altman's home, and shots were fired at the door of an Indiana councillor over state data centre discussions. Canadians do hold negative sentiments: more than two-thirds of Canadians would oppose a data centre being built near their home, and just one in three trust AI. Despite that opposition, backlash here hasn't materialized to the same extent. However, this incident, as well as protests across the country against data centres, might indicate growing friction. Your unclaimed credit has an exact dollar figure Conservative R&D tax credit claims feel safe, but that comfort has a price you pay every year. Companies afraid of audits claim less than they're owed, when the real protection is evidence: Every hour traced to Jira, GitHub, and payroll, made defensible before anyone asks. That's how Boast finds 10 to 20 percent more than accounting firms do across SR&ED, IDMTC and CDAE-IA, on under five hours of your team's time on average. Twenty minutes puts a dollar figure on yours. Claim aggressively. Defend confidently. Drama at DeepMind Google's stock price dropped on Wednesday after it announced major changes to its AI unit. The company, which has been criticized for falling behind in the AI race, shifted the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, to the chief scientist role, according to Reuters. Jeff Dean and several other notable engineers also left to start their own venture, Discovery Loop, which Toronto-based Radical Ventures announced it is backing. Data is becoming just as valuable as crops for some farmers. The Globe and Mail reports on the AI-powered tools enhancing farming operations in the real world, and the effort to boost Canada's lagging AgTech investment and adoption rate. Crawlers stop crawling Independent media outlet stupidDOPE said its website was brought down after it was accessed and scraped more than 70 million times by web crawlers pulling content for six AI companies. Reporting from 404 Media shows that web crawlers are proving to be a pest, as platforms like Cloudflare and Patreon are moving to block crawlers intended for AI training. SpaceX's crash landing The rocket that SpaceX crashed into the moon wasn't its only sudden descent this week. While the stock price of Elon Musk's space company climbed leading up to its first earnings call on Tuesday evening, those gains were erased after SpaceX reported a sixfold increase in capital expenditures, mostly related to AI spending. As of Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX was trading at around $110 USD per share, well below its all-time high of $225 and IPO price of $135 per share. Coldcard breached Well over $100 million USD in Bitcoin has been stolen from users of Coldcard, an offline crypto wallet storage device made by Toronto-based Coinkite, according to CBC News. Hackers figured out the algorithm the device used to generate seed phrases on an old firmware version; now the company is urging users to migrate their keys immediately. Misinformation spreading like wildfire Canadian wildfires are getting worse, and so is the misinformation surrounding them. The Narwhal reports how misleading AI summaries, incorrect AI-generated maps and infographics, and conspiracy theories can bring real-world risks. Applications Are Now Open: Investment Bootcamp The Black Entrepreneurship Alliance is accepting applications for its fully funded, four-month Investment Bootcamp. Designed for Black-led tech founders, the program helps strengthen your capital strategy and fuel growth. Selected founders receive 1:1 mentorship, expert-led workshops, and specialized support in finance, legal, and marketing. You also gain dedicated co-working space, a 3-month YSpace membership, investor connections, and the chance to pitch at a Demo Day for up to $20K in prizes. Two streams available: Pre-revenue with a validated MVP Post-revenue ($1K+ MRR) Only 10 ventures selected. Applications close on August 30. Apply here. On the move This week's hires, fires, and exec shakeups: * FinTech leaders from Wealthsimple, Koho, and ABCorp have joined the board of the Canadian Prepaid Providers Organization. * Montréal-based meal kit service Goodfood is seeking creditor protection after the resignation of its CEO, Selim Bassoul. * U of T prof Sanja Fidler left her role as Nvidia's VP of AI research. * Well Health said it appointed Loreto Grimaldi as its chief legal officer and Kaytek Przybylski as its chief digital and information officer. * Former Float product manager Sarah Marion announced on LinkedIn that she's joined Wealthsimple to lead its kids and teens accounts. * Richmond, BC-based mining tech startup Ideon Technologies said it appointed Anirban Basu as its VP of software engineering. * Toronto blockchain firm Tokenwell appointed Sheldon Levy as CEO following Timothy J. Burgess' departure last month. * Digital wellness platform LifeSpeak appointed former Telus Health leader Neil King as CEO. * Toronto youth are 'disheartened' over the labour market after 50,000 people applied for just 5,000 jobs at the CNE this year, CBC News reported. Want to feature a hiring announcement on our list? Email [email protected] with the subject line JOBS. Fill in the blank: "____maxxing is not what we are optimizing for," Microsoft EVP Jay Parikh said in an email to employees. Find out how you did Contributors: Alex Riehl (Ottawa staff writer), Douglas Soltys (editor in chief), Sarah Rieger (managing editor), Trevor Nichols (web editor). Feature image courtesy Sarah Reiger for BetaKit.

Jeff Dean, who for years was one of Google’s most important executives, is leading the new artificial intelligence company with the backing of Google.

AI chip startup Etched raises 300 million dollars at a 10.3 billion dollar valuation to challenge Nvidia. Editorial Team July 23, 2026 at 5:10 PM UTC Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a 300 million dollar Series C funding round at a 10.3 billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its worth in less than a month as demand for its specialized inference hardware continues to outpace what the company can currently supply. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion and SK Hynix. According to the company, the financing represents the highest valuation ever recorded for a Sequoia-led Series C round, underscoring how quickly investor enthusiasm for specialized AI hardware has escalated over the past year. From near collapse to a leading Nvidia challenger. Etched was founded in 2022 by Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen, who all dropped out of Harvard and went on to become Thiel Fellows, a program that funds young founders who skip traditional higher education to build companies. The three bonded over a shared conviction that transformer-based AI models would come to dominate the field, and built their company around a bet that general-purpose graphics processing units, the chips Nvidia has built its dominance on, would not remain the most efficient way to run those models at scale. That bet nearly failed early on. In 2023, Etched came close to running out of money entirely, struggling to get investors interested in a company focused on a narrow, specialized approach to AI hardware at a time when the industry's attention was fixed almost entirely on training ever larger models rather than the less glamorous business of running them efficiently once built. A rapid reversal built on inference demand. The turnaround came as the AI industry's center of gravity began shifting from training toward inference, the computational process that occurs every time a deployed AI model receives a prompt and generates a response. Etched's flagship product, a chip system called Sohu, is built specifically for this task, embedding transformer architecture directly into the hardware itself rather than relying on the general-purpose flexibility of a traditional GPU. That specialization, the company argues, allows Sohu to run transformer models with meaningfully greater speed and lower cost per inference than general-purpose alternatives, including Nvidia's own chips. Etched has said its systems are faster, cheaper and more energy efficient than competing hardware, a claim that has helped the company secure more than a billion dollars in customer contracts for its inference systems. Backing from a notable cross-section of investors. Etched's cap table has grown to include an unusually wide mix of financial and strategic investors, including Jane Street, which has invested more than 100 million dollars into the company, along with Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, Radical Ventures, Primary Venture Partners and Positive Sum. Strategic backing has come from VentureTech Alliance, a fund with ties to chip manufacturer TSMC, positioning Etched closer to the physical supply chain it depends on for chip production. The company has also attracted a striking group of individual angel investors from within the AI research community itself, including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch and Scott Wu, alongside billionaire investors Peter Thiel and Stanley Druckenmiller. That combination of deep technical credibility and financial firepower has helped Etched move from a company barely on industry radars in 2023 to one of the most closely watched challengers in the AI chip market today. Scaling production to match surging demand. With its new capital, Etched plans to expand production capacity and accelerate customer deployments, building on an 80,000 square foot facility it recently opened near its San Jose, California headquarters specifically to expand prototyping and manufacturing capacity. The company has said demand for its AI inference systems continues to outpace available supply as customers move from evaluating the technology to actually deploying it in production environments. Etched's valuation trajectory has been unusually steep even by the standards of the current AI funding environment, moving from roughly 5 billion dollars in a December 2025 round led by Stripes to 10.3 billion dollars in this latest Sequoia-led raise, with reports suggesting the company may already be pursuing a further round at a valuation approaching 20 billion dollars. That pace of back to back fundraising, each round closing before the previous one has even had time to be fully absorbed by the market, has become an increasingly common pattern among the AI industry's most sought after infrastructure companies. A narrow bet in an increasingly crowded field. Etched's strategy remains deliberately narrow: rather than attempting to compete with Nvidia across the full range of AI workloads, the company is focused entirely on doing one thing, running transformer-based inference, as efficiently as possible. With Nvidia projecting more than 500 billion dollars in cumulative data center sales by the end of 2026, Etched is not positioning itself to replace the incumbent everywhere, but rather to carve out a defensible, high-value niche within a rapidly expanding market. Whether that focused approach can continue justifying valuations rising this quickly, especially for chip systems still in the early stages of full commercial validation, remains an open question facing Etched and the broader wave of specialized AI hardware startups now racing to capture a share of the inference market as it scales alongside global AI deployment.