Beyond the Data
How Ottawa is becoming North America's climate, livability, and applied technology haven.
Climate, livability, and applied technology.
Ottawa’s surprise to many is how little the capital trades on being one, shunning the narrow administrative narrative of many large capitals of middle power nations. Beyond Parliament Hill is Kanata North, Canada’s largest technology park. Within Kanata Park hundreds of firms and thousands of engineers are working on 5G and 6G, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. Kanata North has been the long standing home of the country’s telecommunications industry. Ottawa is making a name for itself as the city where technology is designed, developed, and tested in the field. Ottawa’s unique cold weather climate, and emerging status as a city with stable water security, has attracted companies in the emerging technology markets, looking to prove their technologies in an all weather environment. This is the purpose of Area X.O, which is invest Ottawa’s all weather research complex, where autonomous and connected systems are tested against the full force of the Canadian winter. In 2025 it became the launch site for one of the country’s first all-season automated shuttles. The shuttle carried passengers on public roads that would idle fair-weather vehicles. For Berkof we witnessed how Ottawa’s unique geography reinforces this case. Positioned inland on a clean hydroelectric grid, insulated from the coastal and heat exposures that increasingly troubles other technology hubs, the geography is the readiness frame as a long-life host for the power-hungry, water thirsty infrastructure of the next decade. The city is also building for growth, with new corporate campuses that pair workplaces with housing, to ensure its high quality talent can stay for the long term. Ottawa is building a future as a proving ground for the technology that depends on it.
High quality of life, good urbanism, and climate security are setting the foundations for Ottawa's future.
Business
How Ottawa is providing the tech the rest of the world will run on.
Kanata North is where Ottawa tests autonomous vehicles in real winters. When Berkof toured two companies headquartered in the same city it showed how the city is becoming home to the innovative startups and legacy companies that develop the connectivity the AI economy runs over, and the hardware it runs on. Telesat is an Ottawa based company, building Lightspeed. Lightspeed is a sovereign low-Earth-orbit constellation of nearly two hundred satellites, backed by more than two and a half billion Canadian dollars of public and private capital. First launches are scheduled for 2026 with military grade spectrum being added throughout the year. Canada is looking to secure connectivity across its own Arctic and remote north. Close by, Ranovus has expanded its Ottawa plant to make co-packaged optics. These are the silicon-photonics interconnects that move data between AI chips with light instead of copper, cutting the power and latency that now constrain large models. Ottawa is developing its economy of the present and future based on building and commercialising the technology that data travels through. Ottawa’s climate resilient inland physical geography, and clean hydro grid is making it a credible long term home for the future of compute infrastructure manufacturing.
‘Kanata North is Canada's largest technology park with over 540 companies spanning 5G, artificial intelligence, connected and autonomous vehicles and cyber security, now densifying into a walkable mixed-use innovation district’.
High quality of life and innovative workplaces are attracting skilled workers to Kanata North