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Ottawa backs $400-million tech investment in BHP Saskatchewan mine – The Globe and Mail

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BHP CEO Mike Henry in Saskatoon, Sask., on June 13.Liam Richards/Photo Liam Richards

The federal government has committed $100-million to BHP Group Ltd.’s planned $400-million investment in technology designed to make its Jansen project in Saskatchewan the world’s greenest potash mine.

Two cabinet ministers – François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food – were in Saskatoon on Monday with BHP chief executive Mike Henry to announce the initiative. BHP is budgeting a total of $7.5-billion on the first stage of what will become the world’s largest potash mine. Mr. Henry called the project “a vote of confidence in Canada.”

BHP, backed by the government, is investing in technology such as electric underground mining equipment – rather than traditional diesel-powered gear. Government funding will also help pay for automation and technology that reduces water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Over a breakfast meeting on Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the BHP team to express support for the project.

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The Jansen mine is expected to begin producing potash in 2026. BHP forecasts its technology investments will cut the facility’s greenhouse gas emissions in half compared with comparable existing potash mines, and lower water consumption by 60 per cent against peers.

“BHP is the poster child for environmentally-friendly mining,” Mr. Champagne said in an interview. He said the government is in talks with other miners, including Rio Tinto Group on similar investments. He said: “We want Canada to be the green supplier of choice, as a producer of green steel, green aluminum and green batteries, along with green potash.”

Jansen, located 140 kilometres east of Saskatoon, is the first new underground potash mine built in Canada in 50 years. It is the single largest project ever undertaken by Melbourne, Australia-based BHP, and the company’s first potash mine.

BHP predicts demand for potash will increase in coming decades, owing to the need for fertilizer that feeds increasingly affluent consumers from less arable land. Ms. Bibeau said: “Our government’s investment in the world’s greenest potash mining facility will help our farmers feed a growing world population.”

Over the past year, BHP exited oil and gas – spinning out the business in a US$20-billion transaction – and announced plans to sell mines that produce coal for energy. Mr. Henry described strategy as “a pivot to future-facing commodities.” Along with potash, BHP is a major producer of copper, iron ore and metallurgical coal, which is used in steel making.

Mr. Champagne said providing subsidies to companies such as BHP is a cost of doing business and remaining competitive for new projects. He said every industrial nation features government programs that support innovation and transitioning to a green economy.

“We never win projects based entirely on money. We win based on our strength across the board, on talent, on stability,” Mr. Champagne said, pointing to a string of recent investments in Canada by foreign automakers and battery manufacturers. He said: “Canada is on an a roll.”

The first stage of the Jansen mine will employ 600 – Mr. Henry said 20 per cent of the work force will in Indigenous – and the project has a lifespan of at least 50 years.

Based on the size of the potash reserves, BHP forecast there could be four stages of development over the next 15 years. Mr. Champagne pushed the mining company to move quicker on the expansion. He said: “Let’s seize the moment. Let’s be ambitious.”

Along with Saskatchewan, Russia and Belarus have the world’s largest known potash reserves. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted some countries to boycott exports from those two nations and pushed up potash prices. Looking ahead, Mr. Henry said Russia and Belarus may struggle to access the capital they need to develop new potash properties, while Saskatchewan will continue to be an attractive jurisdiction for miners.

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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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