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Canada makes largest federal investment in Tecumseh's history to protect the Town from future flooding – Canada NewsWire

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TECUMSEH, ON, Oct. 26, 2020 /CNW/ – The safety and well-being of Canadians remains the Government of Canada’s top priority as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. The federal government is taking decisive action to support families, businesses and communities, and continues to look ahead to see what more can be done. Investing in infrastructure to create jobs and strengthen local economies is a key part of these initiatives.

In recent years, the communities of Tecumseh and Windsor experienced catastrophic storms that caused significant flood damage to local residences and businesses. Now more than ever, communities need help adapting to these intensifying weather events caused by climate change.

Today, Irek Kusmierczyk, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion and Member of Parliament for Windsor−Tecumseh, on behalf of the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, and his Worship Gary McNamara, Mayor for the Town of Tecumseh, announced significant funding to reduce the impact of severe storms and flooding in the Town of Tecumseh.

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The Government of Canada is investing $10.7 million in this flood resiliency project through the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund (DMAF). This is the single largest federal investment in Tecumseh’s history. The Town is also contributing more than $16 million to complete the project.

The work involves the construction of and improvements to four infrastructure assets: decommissioning of the St. Mark’s Pump Station; construction of a new consolidated Scully and St. Mark’s Pump Station; improvements to the PJ Cecile Pump Station and; improvements to the storm sewers at two locations to move storm water runoff to the consolidated Scully and St. Mark’s pump station.

This investment is just one of many regional flood-related projects recently funded by the Government of Canada, including a historic $32,090,691 investment in flood mitigation for Windsor in 2019.

Quotes

“On my very first day as MP for WindsorTecumseh, I met with Mayor McNamara to discuss key priorities for the Town of Tecumseh. With severe weather events on the rise, funding from the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund was outlined as a critical need. I am proud of the terrific collaboration between our federal government and the Town to deliver this important investment for the residents of Tecumseh. Once complete, the Tecumseh flood resiliency project will protect residences and businesses from the severe effects of flooding.”

Irek Kusmierczyk, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion and Member of Parliament for Windsor−Tecumseh, on behalf of the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Infrastructure and Communities

“Flooding continues to be the most frequent and costly natural disaster in Canada. By investing in infrastructure, the Government of Canada is helping communities, like the Town of Tecumseh, increase their resiliency. The DMAF helps protect Canadians by reducing the risk of climate change and the long-term costs associated with replacing infrastructure following natural disasters.”

The Honourable Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness

My Council colleagues and I have heard from residents that more needs to be done to protect them from flooding and flood mitigation is a vital priority for our Council. This funding will assist in building our town’s resiliency and keeping our community and its residents safe.”

 His Worship Gary McNamara, Mayor of the Town of Tecumseh

Quick facts

  • Windsor and Tecumseh have received over $50 Million to fund 16 projects related to flooding and wastewater.
  • The Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund (DMAF) is a $2-billion, 10-year program to help communities build the infrastructure they need to better withstand natural hazards such as floods, wildfires, earthquakes and droughts.
  • To date, more than $1.7 billion has been announced through DMAF for 60 large-scale infrastructure projects that will help protect communities across the country from the threats of climate change.
  • DMAF is part of the federal government’s Investing in Canada plan, which is providing more than $180 billion over 12 years for public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and rural and northern communities.
  • To support Canadians and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new stream has been added to the over $33-billion Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program to help fund pandemic-resilient infrastructure. Existing program streams have also been adapted to include more eligible project categories.
  • The COVID-19 Resilience Stream will help other orders of governments whose finances have been significantly impacted by the pandemic by increasing the federal cost share for public infrastructure projects.
  • The Canada Healthy Communities Initiative will provide up to $31 million in existing federal funding to support communities as they deploy innovative new ways to adapt spaces and services to respond to immediate and ongoing needs arising from COVID-19 over the next two years.

Associated links

Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund
http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/dmaf-faac/index-eng.html 

Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund projects in Ontario
https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/prog-proj-on-eng.html#1.3   

Investing in COVID-19 Community Resilience
https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/covid-19-resilience-eng.html

Investing in Canada: Canada’s Long-Term Infrastructure Plan
http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/icp-publication-pic-eng.html 

Investing in Canada plan project map
http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/gmap-gcarte/index-eng.html

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Web: Infrastructure Canada

SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

For further information: Contacts: Chantalle Aubertin, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, 613-949-1759, [email protected]; Lesley Reeves, Manager Strategic Initiatives, Town of Tecumseh, 519-735-2184 ext 150, [email protected]; Media Relations: Infrastructure Canada, 613-960-9251, Toll free: 1-877-250-7154, [email protected]

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

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Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
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Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

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The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

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