Montréal-based Hypertec is expanding its Canadian AI hardware manufacturing capabilities through a collaboration with VAST Data, starting with a deployment valued at approximately $22 million for BUZZ High Performance Computing.
The agreement will see Hypertec manufacture VAST-powered EBox storage systems at its Montréal facility. The platforms support demanding workloads including AI training, inference, analytics and high-performance computing.
The announcement addresses a practical challenge for AI infrastructure operators: expensive graphics processing units need a steady supply of data to remain productive. Storage performance and data movement can become bottlenecks that limit utilization.
Hypertec will build and configure the systems for the VAST AI Operating System, adding storage manufacturing to its existing Canadian compute capabilities.
The expansion follows Hypertec’s entry into NVIDIA’s Canadian OEM manufacturing ecosystem earlier this year. Together, the developments broaden the range of AI infrastructure equipment the company can produce domestically.
The BUZZ HPC deployment also builds on the sovereign AI partnership involving Bell, Cohere, Hypertec and BUZZ announced in June. That initiative combines Canadian data centre capacity and connectivity with locally manufactured hardware, cloud services and enterprise AI models.
For Canada’s data centre sector, the latest agreement offers a concrete example of domestic manufacturing participating in the investment flowing into AI infrastructure.