CQL · CANADA QUANT LABS · EST. 2026

Canada
Quant Labs.

Canada's open-weight model lab. We train, quantize, and deploy sovereign AI on Canadian Blackwell silicon — for the regulated industries that can't run on someone else's API.

Operates on
NVIDIA DGX B300
Headquarters
Victoria, BC · Canada
Serving
Legal · Medical · Defence · Finance
SCROLL
I   /   THESIS

The country is investing.
No one is building the model.

Public capital is flowing through every layer of the Canadian AI stack — data centres, compute subsidies, defence platforms, sovereign cloud. The one layer that's empty is the one where the IP actually lives.

Canada is investing $2 billion in sovereign AI. No open, sovereign model lab exists.

$1B
AI Compute Access Fund. $300M base, $700M top-up under "AI for All".
ISED · JUN 2026
$925.6M
Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program. A national supercomputer; CFP now open.
BUDGET 2025
$900M
Defence Industrial Strategy injection. Drone hub, NRC, quantum.
NRC · MAR 2026
$6B
BDC Defence Platform. Launched at $4B, topped up to $6B in cheques.
BDC · MAR 2026
II   /   LANDSCAPE

Where the Canadian stack actually sits.

Every dollar today flows through closed APIs, telco-hosted metal, or thin wrapper layers. Cohere just open-weighted Command A+ — a Canadian foundation worth building on. The layer above it — vertical-specialized, audited, customer-owned — is still unoccupied.

APPLICATION
Workday · ServiceNow · SAP integrations · North agents
MODEL
Cohere Command A+ (open-weight, frontier-general · Apache-2.0, May 2026)
INFERENCE / SERVING
Featherless · vLLM & SGLang derivatives
INFRASTRUCTURE
Bell AI Fabric · Telus Sovereign Factory · CoreWeave (US)
THE GAP

Open-weight,
sovereign,
vertical models.

Trained in Canada.
Quantized in Canada.
Deployed in Canada.
Owned by the customer.
III   /   WHAT WE DO

Three disciplines.
One toolchain.

We're not a wrapper. Not a hosting platform. Not a fine-tuning API. We take frontier open base models and produce shippable, quantized, sovereign deployments — with the IP and audit evidence customers actually own.

01   TRAIN

Train.

Post-training on open base models. SFT, DPO, GRPO, RLAIF. Customer data stays sovereign throughout the run.

  • TRL · Axolotl · DeepSpeed
  • Custom GRPO trainer
  • FP8 / BF16 training stable
02   QUANTIZE

Quantize.

Production W4A16, NVFP4, MXFP4 recipes — with MTP draft heads preserved so speculative decoding survives end-to-end. Patches land upstream in vLLM and llm-compressor.

  • llm-compressor · GPTQ · AWQ
  • SmoothQuant · QuaRot
  • Compressed-tensors format
03   DEPLOY

Deploy.

Air-gapped, on-prem, sovereign cloud. With audit trails, eval evidence, and model risk documentation packaged with the build.

  • vLLM · FlashAttention-3
  • CUTLASS · custom kernels
  • lm-eval-harness pipelines
IV   /   VERTICALS

Four regulated industries.
One model factory.

We're starting wide. The verticals will narrow themselves as contracts land — not as we pretend to know. Each one has a clear buyer set, a clear corpus, and a clear wedge against frontier general models.

LEGAL

Hallucination floors below frontier models on Canadian case law.

Buyers BigLaw · in-house counsel · courts · Department of Justice Corpora Canadian case law · statutes · CIPO · provincial regulation
MEDICAL

On-prem deployable, PHIPA/PIPEDA-clean, evidence-cited outputs.

Buyers Provincial health authorities · hospital networks · pharma R&D Corpora PubMed · MIMIC-IV · CIHI · Health Canada
DEFENCE

Air-gapped, classified-ready, doctrine-aware, Five Eyes interoperable.

Buyers DND · CSE · Shared Services Canada · prime contractors Corpora OSINT · NATO doctrine · allied technical material
FINANCE

OSFI-aligned, MRM-documented, audit-ready, on Canadian soil.

Buyers Big Six banks · credit unions · insurers · pension funds Corpora Public filings · regulatory guidance · market data · client corpora
V   /   WHY NOW

Six forces.
One window.

Sovereign AI in Canada has shifted from policy paper to active deployment in under twelve months. The first lab to ship audited, vertical, open-weight models with defence contracts behind them owns the category.

POLICY
“AI for All” national AI strategy launched June 2026 — ~$2B new, targeting +$200B GDP and 250K AI jobs by 2031.
PUBLIC CAPITAL
$2B sovereign-AI program plus a $6B BDC Defence Platform writing cheques today.
DEFENCE
SSC + DND + CSE jointly building a "made-in-Canada AI tool" — with an explicit company-partner ask.
GEOPOLITICS
US trade volatility has Canadian buyers demanding sovereign alternatives by procurement mandate.
REGULATION
AIDA, EU AI Act extraterritorial reach, OSFI MRM — compliance-grade AI is now table-stakes.
INCUMBENT GAP
Cohere's Command A+ is now open-weight — a base, not a finish. Bell hosts metal. Featherless wraps. Nobody ships vertical-specialized, audited, customer-owned deployments on top.
VI   /   MODELS

Six checkpoints shipped.
More in flight.

W4A16 and NVFP4 quants of Hy3, GLM-5.2, and DeepSeek-V4 — benchmarked in the open, served through vLLM, and downloadable on Hugging Face. The full catalogue now lives on its own page.

Browse the model catalogue

VII   /   NEWS

What we're shipping,
written up in the open.

Engineering notes and release writeups from the lab — recipes, evaluation methodology, and the walls we hit along the way. The same rigor that goes into the model cards, in long form.

View all news

VIII   /   CONTACT

Sovereign AI
is a build, not a brand.

If your organization needs a model it can audit, deploy on-prem, and keep under Canadian jurisdiction — we should talk. We respond to every serious inquiry within 48 hours.

Get in touch. Build with us.

What vertical?

Or email partnerships@cql.ca · press@cql.ca directly.