đď¸ House Calls: Inside Simply Silicon, the Bet to Build Canada's First Trillion Dollar Company
A recap of our first ever Tech Thursday: House Calls episode, recorded on-site at Foundation, Simply Silicon's downtown Calgary data centre, with co-founders Graeme Harrison and Dan Chapman
This is the first edition of Tech Thursday: House Calls, our new on-site interview series. The premise is simple. Most interviews happen in studios, with branded backdrops and rehearsed framing. We wanted to actually go inside the companies and talk to founders in the rooms where the work is happening.
For the first one, we drove down to Foundation, Simply Siliconâs data centre site in downtown Calgary, and sat down with Graeme Harrison and Dan Chapman. They co-founded Augur VC together and incubated Simply Silicon out of their first fund. Foundation is the first site. They have plans for more.
Most of the people in Canadian tech who pay attention to AI infrastructure already know about Augur VC. Theyâve been one of the more publicly contrarian voices on the Canadian data centre buildout, with Dan in particular calling an âAlberta data centre bubbleâ months before the rest of the industry started using the phrase. And yet here they are, building one of the biggest data centre projects in the country.
This is the on-site conversation about why.
âOur goal is to build Canadaâs first trillion dollar company.â Graeme Harrison
Watch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. And let us know what you want House Calls to visit next.
1. The Bubble They Called, and the Project Theyâre Building Inside It
The takeaway: Most Alberta data centre announcements are pitches that will never get built. Foundation is positioned as the inverse, with a specific customer thesis and physical infrastructure thatâs genuinely hard to replicate.
Graeme has been blunt about the broader market for almost two years. He told us that starting in 2023, Augur was receiving two to three data centre pitches a day, seven days a week, for months. Real estate developers chasing the AI wave, mostly without a real customer in mind.
âYou have these people building on the thesis of âbuild it and they will come.â Thatâs not how it works in this space. If you donât have an offtaker in mind, strong relationships, an understanding of what they want, the vast majority wonât convert. The vast majority will end up stranded, and so youâll see wealth destruction.â Graeme Harrison
Dan extended the point into what he sees as the structural failure of most Canadian data centre developers right now:
âIf you donât know your customer, or youâre trying to sell to your customer based on what they wanted four years ago because it took you that long to build a project, do you have a product? You donât have a product. You need to sell for what the customer wants today, that theyâre willing to pay for today. Or you need to be foresightful enough to see, this is actually what theyâre going to need, because this is where the worldâs going. Itâs very rare to see that kind of insight out of the developers in Alberta, unfortunately.â Dan Chapman
What separates Foundation, in their telling, is the combination of three things: an existing physical site with characteristics that canât be replicated, a specific use case (inference, not training), and a customer base theyâve been building relationships with for the better part of two years.
Why this matters: The thesis theyâre building from is that Calgary is about to become Canadaâs first AI-native city. Not the city with the most data centres, but the city where the infrastructure exists for next-generation AI services that need low-latency inference close to where people and machines actually are. Humanoid robots that need to offboard their thinking to the cloud. Industrial AI cameras. Autonomous delivery. The kinds of services that donât work if your data centre is in the middle of nowhere.
2. Why Calgary, and Why Now
The takeaway: The combination of Calgaryâs energy infrastructure legacy, its capital concentration, its proximity to San Francisco, and its regulatory simplicity makes it, in their analysis, the best market in the world for this specific kind of build.
This was the section of the conversation that probably surprised me the most. I expected a hometown pitch. What I got was a structured comparison against the global alternatives.
âCalgary, thanks to its energy legacy and its infrastructure legacy, is really a one-of-a-kind place. Its cultural values, its proximity to San Francisco, the natural gas of Alberta, the deregulated market here, the ability to largely move without an overburden of permits. If you scour the whole world and you give a score and stack rank every market, Calgaryâs number one. And itâs not just number one by a little bit. Itâs number one by a lot. It beats Houston. It beats London. Certainly San Francisco canât do this on its own.â Graeme Harrison
Graeme went on to make a point that Iâve been thinking about since we left the site. The companies that have generated the most value in the last decade are not, when you look at them carefully, software companies. Theyâre infrastructure businesses dressed in software clothes.
âGoogleâs an infrastructure business. Microsoftâs an infrastructure business. NVIDIA is a physical world business. These are all companies that make things and print cash off of physical assets in the physical world.â Graeme Harrison
Dan added the capital concentration argument that Calgary boosters often miss. Itâs not just that there is capital in Calgary. Itâs that the people behind that capital understand infrastructure investing in a way that capital concentrated in other Canadian cities does not.
âThereâs a concentration of capital here, and itâs not just that thereâs venture funds, thereâs private equity. Itâs the people behind the investments out of Calgary. Individuals that have built their livelihoods, built their legacies, and want to continue their legacies into infrastructure. This is the next macro mega category of infrastructure: data, the intersection of chips and power, and whatever powers that electricity, the ocean of natural gas that we sit on.â Dan Chapman
Why this matters: The argument here isnât civic pride. Itâs that infrastructure businesses get built by people who already know how to build infrastructure businesses. Calgary has that talent at a density that very few other cities in North America can match. Thatâs the bet.
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3. The Moat, the Trillion Dollar Goal, and the Just Sovereign Versus Also Sovereign Framework
The takeaway: Foundation is the first node in a planned network of sites with similar physical characteristics. The moat is the sites themselves. The goal is to use that moat to build something the country has never produced before.
We spent the back half of the conversation on what comes after Foundation, and how big this could actually get. The conviction here is meaningful.
âOur goal is to build Canadaâs first trillion dollar company. Canadaâs biggest startups have only grown to about the $100 billion scale. Thatâs a big company and itâs a big success, donât get me wrong, but weâve never done anything thatâs breached the next level above that. And that doesnât really make sense, because weâre extremely well positioned to do it.â Graeme Harrison
The plan, as Graeme described it, is to acquire sites across North America with the same kind of physical characteristics Foundation has. Existing infrastructure that canât be replicated by a new entrant, no matter how much capital they have. He used the example of the conduit network underneath downtown Calgary.
âIf I came along, an Elon Musk, and Iâm like, âIâve got infinite money, hey City of Calgary, can I tear up eight miles of your roads in the next few months to lay fiber?â Youâre gonna be told no, no matter how much you put on the table. Itâs just too disruptive at this point to replicate.â Graeme Harrison
We also got into the conversation about sovereign compute, which has been one of the more confusing topics in Canadian AI infrastructure over the last year. Graeme has an unusually clean framework for it.
âThereâs a great framework that we use, which is: is a company just sovereign or also sovereign? If itâs just sovereign, youâll see that it lives in lobbying land. It markets exclusively to governments. It exists as a byproduct of RFP land. Those companies, from our perspective in VC land, arenât investible. You become a creature of the moment of policy wins. Also sovereign: what weâre building here is not aimed at delivering a sovereign service inherently. Itâs aimed at making money and being globally competitive. But because itâs air-gapped and not even touching the internet, we can also do a sovereign play.â Graeme Harrison
Why this matters: This is the part of the conversation that most clearly distinguishes Simply Silicon from the broader Canadian sovereign-compute conversation. The companies that win, in their telling, will be the ones that are competitive on global merit first, and capable of serving sovereign use cases second. Not the other way around.
A Few Things That Stuck With Us
A few moments from the conversation that we keep coming back to:
Graeme on Canadian builders. âCanada makes the worldâs best entrepreneurs. We have an ultra high talent production rate compared to other places. You grew up on the prairies like us. Thereâs nothing to do all day. Thereâs no trees around. Youâre taller than the grass. Youâre looking around, youâre like, âWhy am I even on this world?â It leads to this ability to see more and to want more.â
Dan on the wealth ambition. âMy greatest goal is to create an obscene amount of wealth for all of these people in Calgary who have placed their bets on us, so that this cycle can just grow and grow and grow.â
Graeme on government industrial policy. âCanada makes incredible entrepreneurs. We donât do a great job of taking that talent and converting it to billion dollar outcomes. The sovereign compute RFP youâre seeing is a symptom of that. Itâs trying to pull something out: âwe want to give this industrial subsidy, we want to create this value chain. We recognize itâs not happening naturally. Instead of creating the conditions for it to happen naturally, why donât we try and force it?â Well, it never works.â
Whatâs Next for Simply Silicon
The team is in the middle of standing up Foundation. Theyâve been acquiring additional sites across North America with similar physical profiles. The plan is to scale the model from one Calgary site to many, in the cities where the AI native economy needs the infrastructure to live.
Weâll be back to visit. House Calls, after all, is about going to see the work.
Massive thanks to Graeme and Dan for letting us spend the morning at Foundation, and for being as candid as they were on camera. And thanks to the Simply Silicon team for the tour.
Coming up at Tech Thursday:
đŚ May 21st - SOLD OUT!
Topic - Building Fintech in Canada w/ Wealthsimple
Co-hosted by: Wealthsimple
Featuring:
Channing Allen, Senior Engineering Manager at Wealthsimple & Co-Founder at Plenty
Jocelyn Jeffrey, Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple
Sam Newman-Bremang, Sr. Director of Product at Wealthsimple
Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday
đ° May 28th
Topic - Nic Beique: The Builder CEO
Co-hosted by: Helcim
What does it really mean to be a builder? Helcimâs Founder and CEO, Nic Beique, shares what heâs been working on firsthand, from early ideas to real code.
Featuring:
Nic Beique, Founder & CEO at Helcim
Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday
𪊠July 6th - Tech Stampede Summit After Party đ¤
Co-hosted by: House 831 and RBCx.
Join us for an evening of connection, conversation, and a bit of Stampede energy with the Calgary Startup Community.
âIn partnership with Fintechs Canada and Canadian Fintech Newsletter.
This is the first episode of Tech Thursday: House Calls. If youâd like us to visit your company next, reply to this email or send a note to: philippe.burns@techthursday.ca