I appreciate the question. I'm sure the meeting that my honourable colleague had was interesting.
Let me say something about skills and talent because, in a sense, that's another form of infrastructure. You have to have the intellectual property, IP, and you have to churn out the research in order to build these companies. We're very proud of the last budget, as the member knows, in which there's a $1.7-billion talent attraction investment to recruit 1,000 of the world's top world-class researchers and their labs, to get the doctoral fellows and to support the universities. That matters because many of these companies are spinoffs from incubators. If you go to Waterloo, to Sherbrooke, to the University of Toronto, to the University of Alberta or to UBC, our campuses are churning out some fantastic companies.
It might be worth mentioning to the member, as well, that we have 800,000 people working in the digital sector in Canada. That is the fastest growing part of our economy, so investing in the sector matters. In the AI sector alone, for some perspective, we have about 3,000 pure-play AI companies right now. These are people starting companies—we mentioned Cohere—and there are, literally, thousands of companies doing things in health care, transport and agriculture.
I was at the University of Guelph: They're using AI to help grow food for farmers here. In the health care sector, to cut wait times, to help surgeries, to reduce second surgeries and brain surgery...the technology is fantastic and it's going to be transformative. That's really important, so we have to invest in that kind of infrastructure, and we're doing that. We have three research chairs...our Canadian Institutes of Health Research are doing that, our Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.... Those are really important.
There's that kind of infrastructure we're investing in, but we're also investing, as I said, in building the actual.... This year you will see we're investing in our compute challenge so that we can build data centres that are sovereign and make sure that we have the infrastructure. I know there are some people who have concerns about that.
I was at a data centre built by a great Canadian company called QScale, outside of Quebec City, in Lévis. They built a $1.2-billion data centre, which is about 140 megawatts, with clean energy. There are some concerns about water use. It has what's called a “closed-loop system”. In other words, they cycle the same water through; they're reusing water. Many of these data centres are also about to capture heat for greenhouse growth, because they generate heat. There are ways to build this so that it generates and drives innovation and very efficiently uses water and energy. That was, by the way, all private investment.
This is happening. The infrastructure is being built, but we have to make sure that, once the infrastructure is built, people trust.... I'm just going to return to that. The trust is important. I often say that technology moves at the speed of innovation, but citizens move at the speed of trust. People have to trust this stuff or they're not going to use it, so that's really important.