This is not a supercomputer

It is surely a well-known fact at this point that we have very little respect for large corporations who view it as their right and imperative to shovel money into the maw of idiot AI. It is therefore our delight to poke a little fun at one such company, if only so that our rank cynicism is held in check for another day.

Telus, of course, is a major telecommunications provider based in Canada. As a company who provides useful things like internet access, they are… well, functional most of the time. (We use their fibre connection, though possibly not for much longer considering the price of it.) They do provide other services, like business-to-business applications, which we presume they can do without making too many mistakes. In any case, we are not concerned with their normal activities; we are here to examine their buildout of AI-related infrastructure across Canada.

Now, consider that Canada has relatively little of this type of hardware at the present time. The data centre juggernaught has yet to get truly rolling here in the Great White North. Telus, however, have decided that the future is in chatbots that are about as gullible as a toddler on a sugar high, and so they simply must spend billions of dollars over the next few years so that said chatbots can be made available with a slight whiff of maple syrup to the populace.

For those of us who despise AI and wish it all manner of distress, this is awful news and likely cause for additional drinking. We, however, remain positive about it all, if only because Telus is not quite as competent as they might has us believe. Their press releases are the stuff of much amusement, in our opinion, and today’s topic of research certainly shows it.

Telus announced in November 2025 that their Rimouski data centre, the so-called Sovereign AI Factory, was named “Canada’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer” by the TOP500 list, a long-running project that lists and ranks the world’s most powerful supercomputers. These are the stuff of science fiction; enormous, room-spanning machines that churn through an ocean of data to produce useful results in hours or days instead of the years it would take for the average desktop. They are used in simulating weather patterns, and, more recently, they were used to analyze compounds with the potential to combat COVID19.

They are, as the youth might say, very cool. They have their place, though usually in a large research lab or military complex due to the cost of hardware and expertise required. The US was traditionally the bleeding edge of supercomputing (and certainly where many of the tropes of supercomputers originated) but it was been dethroned by China in 2025 with the unveiling of the LineShine supercomputer in Shenzhen.

…we’ve said “supercomputer” too often and now the word looks strange to us. Apologies.

At time of writing, Canada has seventeen entires on the TOP500 list. That the Sovereign AI Factory (how we despise the name) is the most powerful in Canada says rather little; there isn’t that much competition for the title to begin with. The performance is also nothing to write home about, being 27.44 petaflops at peak. (FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second; petaflops means “an absolutely ridiculous number of flops”.) For comparison, the LineShine at the top of the list can manage 2,735.82 petaflops at peak.

We would grant Telus that the title was indeed earned fairly, as the TOP500 has been around for decades. But while reading the press release, we could not help but notice that Telus has made much of the announcement by relating it back to the notion that this supercomputer will be used for AI purposes, and their exact words made us laugh.

“The supercomputing infrastructure will enable Canada to accelerate breakthroughs across multiple domains[…]”

Oh, how we are tired of corporate marketing-speak. It grates upon our ears.

Dear readers, this supercomputer is not going to be used like that. A supercomputer is typically judged based on capability, not capacity; they are used to solve one enormous difficult problem, not a bunch of smaller problems at the same time. AI infrastructure is generally not considered a supercomputer because they serve multiple users in parallel. Consider, for example, that the Colossus data centre in Tennessee uses the same chips and the same architecture as Rimouski, and it is not on the TOP500 list despite being a much bigger system. Telus are, in fact, being disingenuous here by lauding their title as “the most powerful supercomputer in Canada” and using it to promote their AI chicanery.

The reality is that this title is meaningless. It is marketing puffery, irrelevant to any real world use case of the technology in question unless Telus is prepared to rent the entire data centre to, say, the Canadian military to use for combat simulations. Conflating idiotic AI with the very useful (but expensive and specialized) nature of supercomputers is highly misleading at best. The Rimouski data centre will have its GPUs and compute rented piecemeal, and nothing even resembling a supercomputer-level problem will ever reach it.

We are annoyed, but not surprised. Remain ever suspicious of anything said by a large tech company, friends. They are not to be trusted.