October 10, 2025 OpenAI may soon set up shop in Canada as the ChatGPT maker explores how it can contribute to the country’s growing artificial intelligence sector.
In an interview with BetaKit, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said Canada’s talent pool, energy resources and access to capital make it an attractive location for expansion.
“As we begin to think about what our presence is going to look like globally, given the [AI] talent pool here, Canada is obviously a place that any AI company would be interested in,” Lehane said. “That’s part of the reason we’re having conversations here.”
Lehane offered no details on timing or location but hinted that an announcement may be coming, telling BetaKit to “stay tuned.”
The company does not currently have an office in Canada but employs a significant number of Canadian developers working with its U.S. research teams. “There’s a lot of Blue Jays shirts this week in our office in San Francisco,” Lehane joked.
Lehane said OpenAI executives have been meeting with federal AI minister Evan Solomon and other public and private-sector leaders to discuss how the company might support Canada’s plans for “sovereign AI.”
“We’re listening and learning from those folks,” he said.
Ottawa has made digital sovereignty a key theme in its AI strategy amid global tensions around data and trade. Solomon has said that sovereignty “does not mean solitude,” signalling that partnerships with international firms like OpenAI will be part of Canada’s approach.
Dev Saxena, OpenAI’s senior advisor on global affairs, said Canada is well-positioned to define where it fits in the global AI value chain.
“From minerals and metals through to energy generation and transmission into the data centre, into AI model training through to application diffusion—that’s one of the most complex and expensive value chains in history,” Saxena said. “No country can do that end to end.”
OpenAI is also looking at securing Canadian data-centre capacity to support its operations, potentially through new infrastructure or by joining existing projects as an anchor tenant.
The company already has several Canadian partnerships, including with Shopify to enable merchants to sell through ChatGPT. It also announced new collaborations this week with the Creative Destruction Lab to help non-profits adopt AI, and with the Vancouver Board of Trade to offer its AI certification program to members.
Lehane declined to comment on an ongoing copyright lawsuit filed by major Canadian publishers, including The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, but said OpenAI is seeking “win-win” arrangements with media outlets.
Canada, long recognized as one of the birthplaces of modern AI, remains a key market for the company. “That’s not the end of the story,” Lehane said. “It’s probably the prologue to what we hope will be a much longer story here.”
