Intel in
Canada
Boosting the Productivity of Canadian Businesses
For over forty years, Intel’s chips have been helping empower Canadian businesses, workers and industries.
Today, we estimate that Intel’s technology is enabling CAN $33 billion a year in higher productivity for businesses across Canada.
On any given day, we estimate over 15 million Intel chips are operating across Canada.
Intel’s Economic Footprint in Canada
Intel’s products and investments are a key driver of economic activity in Canada.
In 2022, we estimate that Intel and its partners contributed CAN $2.4 billion to the Canadian economy.
Intel Canada directly employed 876 people in 2022, while its wider economic footprint supported around 7,500 jobs.
Driving New Innovations for the Future
In order to keep driving technological innovation forward, Intel continues to invest heavily in R&D, partnering with leading Canadian researchers in areas such as AI.
Intel directly invested over CAN $5.8 million in Canadian university R&D between 2018 and 2022.
Intel partnered with over fifteen Canadian academic institutions in 2022, including investment in Canada’s world-leading AI research.
Foreword
For over five decades, Intel’s chips have been the bedrock of Canada’s technological progress, empowering Canadian people, businesses, and governments. With over 15 million Intel chips in operation on any given day, our footprint extends across diverse sectors, from personal devices and automobiles through to cutting-edge medical devices and supercomputers.
This independent report delves into the transformative power of Intel’s microprocessors, highlighting their role in propelling Canada’s economic growth. Indeed, Public First estimates that Intel’s technology contributes a staggering CAN $33 billion annually to increased productivity across the country.
Looking to the future, Intel will continue to be a key partner as Canada takes the lead in the realms of AI, connectivity, cloud infrastructure, and the intelligent edge. Our commitment to open source innovation and collaboration with Canadian institutions underscores our dedication to creating a better world for current and future generations.
I am immensely proud of my team here in Canada, with almost 900 employees sharing their expertise and driving forward new breakthroughs. Together, we remain steadfast in our mission to harness the power of technology for positive change, collaboration, and sustained progress.
Denis Gaudreault
Country Manager- Intel Canada
Introduction
On average, we estimate that there are over 15 million Intel chips operating across Canada on any given day.
From students researching their homework to scientists utilizing supercomputers to develop new treatments, Intel’s products are foundational to Canada’s economy and society. Intel’s microprocessors and chipsets can be found everywhere from PCs, laptops, servers, tablets and smartphones, through to automobiles, broadcasting equipment, automated factory systems, and medical devices.
As Canada asserts itself as a global leader in the technology sector, this report considers Intel’s presence in the country. We explore how Intel contributes to the Canadian economy, boosts productivity across Canadian businesses and drives forward Canadian research and development.
The continued progress of Moore’s Law has helped to drive forward economic growth and the wider digital revolution. For over fifty years, the number of transistors per microchip has roughly doubled every 50 years. A computer operation that takes 5 seconds to complete today would over 2 hours on a chip from the 1970s.
Intel has a history of creating world-changing technology that improves the life of every person on the planet. For more than 50 years, Intel has driven business and society forward by creating radical innovation that revolutionizes the way we live, and ensuring that Moore’s Law continues.
This remains true now more than ever, as technology is increasingly central to every aspect of humanity. Semiconductors are the foundational technology powering digitization, which is then further accelerated by five superpowers: ubiquitous compute, pervasive connectivity, cloud-to-edge infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and sensing.
Together these innovations combine to amplify and reinforce each other, and will exponentially increase the world’s need for computing by packing even more processing capability onto ever-smaller microchips.
In a landscape of rapid digital disruption, Intel’s software, hardware, and data-centric solutions are more critical than ever, with Intel Canada playing a proud part in delivering Intel’s latest innovations.
Intel Canada’s experts are contributing on everything from compiler engineering and the ethernet switching technology required for 5G Base Stations through to Intel Foundry Service’s System Foundry Capabilities. Their work underpins significant intellectual property that is then in execution or production across Intel’s global products.
About This Report
- Public First is a global strategic consultancy that works to help organizations better understand public opinion, analyze economic trends, and craft new policy proposals.
Intel Canada commissioned Public First to explore and quantify their impact on the Canadian economy.
In order to do that, we drew on a variety of sources:
- Intel Canada shared data on their headcount and procurement footprint across Canada.
- In addition, we drew on Intel Canada’s publicly available financial statements and related disclosures.
- Based on this data, we produced new modeling estimates of the total economic impact created by Intel Canada.
- We also conducted a series of research interviews with Intel employees to understand their work.
To learn more about our modeling approach and related terminology, please see the Methodology section in the report’s Appendix. Except where indicated, all figures are based on estimates prepared in accordance with Public First’s methodology. Unless otherwise specified herein, all dollar amounts are expressed in Canadian dollars. Public First is a member of the Market Research Society. All numbers are Public First’s best estimates as of September 2023, and have not been revisited since.
Boosting the Productivity of Canadian Businesses
Today, we estimate that Intel’s technology is enabling CAN $33 billion a year in higher productivity for businesses across Canada.
Intel’s microprocessors are the foundational components of an increasingly digital world. And, as the electronic devices that rely on Intel’s technology become more effective, so does the productivity of the Canadian households and businesses that use them.
Sustained acceleration in the production of semiconductors means that computing power, processing speeds, and memory capacity have all increased exponentially. The technology gets better whilst also getting cheaper ‒ an occurrence often referred to as “Moore’s Law.”
Moore’s Law
In 1965, Intel co-Founder Gordon Moore suggested that computing would dramatically increase in power and decrease in relative cost at an exponential pace. He predicted the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years, with a minimal increase in cost. This prediction became known as Moore’s Law.
To date, Moore’s Law has held true: driven by significant innovations in the electronics industry that allow for faster, smaller and more affordable transistors. This in turn allows for faster, smaller and more affordable technologies, from medical devices through to smartphones.
Moore’s Law only stops when innovation stops – with new innovations in process, packaging and architecture fuelling the ongoing rate of change. By 2030, Intel aspires to deliver approximately 1 trillion transistors in a single device.
Without Moore’s Law, there would have been no breakthrough in AI, no smartphone, and new internet revolution. Most of the new products and services we have enjoyed in the last few decades simply would not have been possible. As a further example, a 1970s sports car featured 8 semiconductors – whereas an average electric car today hosts 5,000 – 7,000 semiconductors.
Ultimately, Moore’s Law’s impact on Canada’s economic growth lies in its ability to catalyze advancements across industries, supporting innovation, competitiveness, and the overall expansion of the economy.
Canadian workers have access to ever-improving computers and devices – meaning they can perform complex tasks more quickly. New tools are emerging every day that allow tasks to be automated and streamlined, while improvements in communication technologies, like quicker internet speeds and improved network capabilities, allow for seamless collaboration across teams.
As computing devices become smaller, lighter, and more powerful, workers can access critical information and tools on-the-move. This mobility and flexibility allow employees to work remotely, attend meetings from different locations, and respond to urgent matters promptly, contributing to increased job efficiency and work-life balance.
On a more industrial scale, the continual evolution of processing power allows businesses to leverage faster and more powerful computers, servers, and other electronic devices across their operations. This in turn allows companies to do more with fewer resources, leading to improved productivity and better utilization of talent and time.
Businesses that embrace and leverage these technologies can also gain a competitive edge by offering better products and services, meeting customer demands more effectively, and staying ahead of competitors.
For example:
- Advancements in processing power have enabled the automotive sector to deploy faster and more efficient control of key systems, such as engine management, transmission, braking, and suspension – resulting in improved overall vehicle performance, fuel efficiency and safety. Looking to the future, new processors, sensors and AI algorithms will help to facilitate the roll-out of autonomous driving, as well as the proliferation of electric vehicles, on Canadian roads.
- The broadcast and media sector has been transformed by continually improving hardware and software. When it comes to production, digital content creation tools give filmmakers, animators, graphic designers, and audio engineers access to higher resolutions, complex visual effects and increasingly sophisticated post-production editing capabilities. Then the streaming and distribution revolution, facilitated by faster processors and improved network capabilities, deliver high definition content directly to consumers’ devices – often accompanied by personalized recommendations generated by AI capabilities.
Over the next five years Intel CPUs could unlock a further CAN $1.4 billion in growth.
Over the next five years Intel CPUs could unlock a further CAN $1.4 billion in growth.
Intel Canada drives innovation and also enables innovation through its partners. Businesses are able to turbocharge their operations, powered by Intel Canada’s software and hardware solutions.
This includes further evolution for CPUs in process, in packaging and in architecture , along with advancements in other emerging technologies including the cloud, connectivity, artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge.
And demand for computing power is only set to increase. As it stands, the world creates nearly 270,000 petabytes (i.e. 27 x1019) of data every day. Intel projects that, by the end of this decade, on average, every individual will have 1 petaflop (1015 floating-point operations per second) of compute and 1 petabyte of data less than 1 millisecond away. This demand for more and more computing power is the push for the industry to maintain the pace of Moore’s Law.
With the ever-accelerating rate of digitisation across the economy, almost every sector stands to benefit from improvements to the technology stack. From health to broadcasting, the use cases for Intel technology are near infinite.
Media: Matrox Video
Matrox Video is a cutting-edge Canadian business, headquartered in Montreal. The company specialises in manufacturing products and components for the broadcast and media, live entertainment, and professional AV/IT markets.
Matrox has recently announced the launch of its new Matrox LUMA series of graphics cards with Intel Arc GPUs. The LUMA range hopes to satisfy significant demand in the mainstream graphics market for driving multiple screens, with a balance between size, reliability, and performance for different applications.
The Intel Canada team has been at the forefront of this new technology, which is expected to proliferate across the global broadcast sector. This in turn will have a positive impact on how consumers experience video content in the future.
Health: Fraser Health Authority
Fraser Health Authority is one of Canada’s largest and fastest growing health authorities, responsible for providing hospital- and community-based health services to over 1.8 million people in British Columbia. Fraser Health operates 12 hospitals across the province, and offers residential care, mental health services, and state-of-the-art outpatient surgeries.
Previously, Fraser Health Authority’s healthcare workers could only access electronic healthcare records and systems at the organization’s care facilities. To enable secure, mobile access to these systems, Fraser Health decided to deploy a new IT platform on Lenovo servers powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
Fraser Health now has the capacity to support up to 10,000 remote workers—helping it to deliver high-quality patient services in a period of unprecedented disruption. This was especially useful when responding to Covid-19, but is also part of the Authority’s long-term strategy to deliver vital health services no matter the circumstances.
Research: University of Victoria
The University of Victoria (UVic) is located on Vancouver Island, and is home to over 22,000 students and 900 full-time faculty members.
The university’s Research Computing Services (RCS) unit provides Advanced Research Computing (ARC) infrastructure and services to university researchers, scientists at institutions across the country, and through international collaborations.
Demand by researchers for more and different types of cloud computing resources prompted the University’s Research Computing Facility to expand their existing digital infrastructure – adding nearly 8,000 new cores with Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
As a result, UVic’s Research Computing Services can support many more researchers across the country, and across all disciplines, with the supercomputing infrastructure that they need to process very large data sets. This in turn accelerates significant scientific endeavors across a host of different disciplines.
As well as the profound impact of Intel’s open source approach.
Moreover, Intel has a longstanding commitment to driving innovation through an open source ecosystem that’s transparent, secure and accessible to all. This further underpins productivity in an even deeper and more meaningful way , as we enter a new era of economic expansion enabled by sustainable, secure and open computing power.
Open source innovation refers to a development approach where software, technology, or solutions are shared freely with the public. It involves a community-driven model, encouraging diverse contributors to collaborate on projects, share ideas, and collectively enhance and refine the codebase. Much of the world relies upon open source software and tools, without even knowing it – from web browsers to delivery apps.
Innovation thrives in collaborative environments that drive continuous improvements through knowledge sharing. Ultimately, embracing open source empowers organizations to streamline operations, adapt to evolving technologies, and stay competitive in the dynamic landscape of modern business.
Intel has been a contributor to open source since 1991, has continuously helped to nurture the ecosystem to grow to where it is today – most recently announcing the general availability of Intel Developer Cloud, allowing developers to build and test applications across a family of Intel products.
Manufacturing: Intel Foundry Service
Intel’s Foundry Service was established in 2021 to help meet the surging global demand for advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity. It offers a combination of leading-edge process and packaging technology, and a world-class IP portfolio.
In 2022, Intel signed a co-investment agreement for up to US$30 billion with Canadian investment company Brookfield Asset Management in order to fund its semiconductor expansion efforts in Arizona, United States.
Intel Canada’s team is then making significant contributions to the Systems Foundry that underpins the Foundry Service. Canadian specialists are supporting the optimization of open source designs for Intel’s production nodes in order to accelerate customer journeys.
This maximizes the benefits of Intel’s extensive existing intellectual property and leverages Canadian expertise in front end design, RTL design and compiler technologies to promote productivity across the sector.
Intel’s Economic Footprint in Canada
In 2022, we estimate that Intel Canada’s direct economic footprint contributed CAN$2.4 billion in GVA to the Canadian economy and supported around 7,500 jobs.
Beyond its wider productivity impact on the Canadian economy, Intel is also a significant enabler of economic activity in Canada through four channels:
its direct investment in staff, research and operations in Canada
the indirect impact of the wider supply chain spending from its operation and investment in Canada
the induced impact from additional local spending by staff it employs and in the wider supply chain
the distribution channel impact from the wholesale, distributors and retail industries that sell Intel products
With offices in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, Intel Canada directly employed 876 people in 2022. These individuals have highly skilled roles spanning Engineering, AI Research, Sales and Marketing – working across the fastest moving fields in both hardware and software solutions.
We then estimate that the wider economic footprint of Intel Canada then supported a further 6,600 jobs through its supply chain networks, and the spending of its employees.
Driving New Innovations for the Future
Intel Canada invested over CAN $5.8 million in university research and development between 2018 and 2022.
Research and development (R&D) is critical to ensure that Intel continues to be on the cutting edge of new technologies. Each generation of products needs to improve user experience through advances in performance, power, cost, connectivity and security.
As Intel transforms beyond a PC-centric company to address the needs of the increasingly data-centric world, it has expanded its product offerings to provide end-to-end solutions across the cloud, connectivity, artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge.
Canada offers significant opportunities to leverage home-grown talent in order to drive new innovations – hence, Intel Canada has made substantial local investments in order to develop new products and services on Canadian shores.
Intel Canada partnered with fifteen academic institutions in 2022.
Intel Canada works closely with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and The Digital Research Alliance of Canada, as well as Canada’s leading universities and research institutions, to foster collaboration on key initiatives.
This includes offering a variety of internships for co-op, undergraduate and postgraduate students across multiple business lines, specializing in software, AI hardware, and manufacturing, as well as marketing and sales.
NSERC COHESA
Intel Canada is a partner of the Strategic Research Network: Computing Hardware for Emerging Intelligent Sensing Applications (COHESA). COHESA seeks to promote advances in hardware for machine learning, bringing together academic and industry researchers from across Canada.
The initiative is backed by CAN $5 million NSERC funding, and involves over 20 leading academics from several Canadian universities – including the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. To date, COHESA has trained 250+ students, researchers and postdocs, resulting in over 150 publications and 14 patents.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the Network intertwines three major research themes:
- Intelligent Sensing
- Hardware, and
- System Software
Intel Canada is part of the Research Program Committee for the network, offering an industry perspective on the applicability of new research.
Intel Canada is committed to promoting responsible AI
AI represents a generational shift in computing. It’s a world that will give rise to a new era of economic expansion enabled by sustainable, open and secure computing power. AI has already been at the forefront of medical, industrial, social, and technological change in our society. But we have barely scratched the surface as to how AI can be built, deployed and scaled.
Research by McKinsey predicts that AI-related semiconductors will see growth of about 18 percent annually over the next few years—five times greater than the rate for semiconductors used in non-AI applications. By 2025, AI-related semiconductors could account for almost 20 percent of all demand.
Intel is therefore heavily investing in designing and manufacturing hardware components specifically optimized for AI workloads, as well as AI-related software applications, tools and frameworks that harness the opportunities for enhanced efficiency, automation and innovation.
Whilst doing so, Intel is committed to implementing leading processes founded on international standards and industry best practices – continuously finding ways to use this technology to drive positive change and better mitigate risks.
Intel is particularly focused on empowering, enabling, and influencing others to create a better world for ourselves and future generations. This includes efforts to democratize the computing capacity required to power technologies such as generative AI, and ongoing collaborations with academic and industry partners to advance research in this area.
In Canada, there is a well-established research community leading activity in this space. The country is home to three National AI Institutes – Mila in Montreal, Amii in Edmonton, and the Vector Institute in Toronto – which offer national and international thought leadership. Intel is proud to work alongside these institutions, in acknowledgement of Canada’s world leading expertise in AI development and deployment.
Intel - Mila Collaboration
In 2022, Intel announced three-year strategic research and co-innovation collaboration with Mila, a world-leading machine learning research institute based in Montreal. The alliance will seek to leverage AI to solve some of the world’s most challenging economic and societal issues.
As part of this partnership, more than 20 researchers across Intel and Mila will focus on applying advanced AI techniques to problems such as climate change, new materials discovery, and digital biology – including accelerating drug development. These projects will take advantage of large-scale high-performance computing to bring us faster and closer to urgently needed solutions.
Both Intel and Mila have a deep commitment to Responsible AI, meaning this collaboration will be driven by an open and responsible approach to innovation – coupled with domain expertise and a commitment to advancing state-of-the-art computing technologies.
Methodology
Economic footprint of Intel Canada
Intel Canada’s economic footprint is modeled on a combination of Intel Canada’s internal data and third-party public data including official government statistics to estimate the business’ direct, indirect and induced impact. Footprint figures are expressed as the gross value added (GVA) and jobs that Intel contributes to the national Canadian economy. All figures are expressed in CAD ($).
The estimated direct impact of Intel Canada is the sum of its assumed profits and wage bill. Intel Canada’s profit is calculated by apportioning Intel’s global earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation to Canada based on total sales data provided by Intel. Where data was not shareable by the company, assumptions were made in line with comparable data. Wage bill assumptions are informed by government statistics on average salaries of working age professional and technical services employees.
The indirect impact of Intel Canada was estimated by applying government economic industry multipliers to Intel Canada’s procurement data shared with Public First. This estimates the impact that Intel Canada has within its own supply chain both in terms of GVA and jobs supported. Indirect impact of Intel Canada also includes its investment in research and development in universities and the wider economic benefit associated with that investment. This was calculated using internal data provided by Intel Canada and academic estimates of the return on the investment.
The induced impact was calculated by applying government economic industry multipliers to the estimated disposable income of Intel Canada employees and wider supply chain. Personal tax rates were weighted in line with the location of Intel Canada employees to reflect varying rates by province.
The distribution channel impact was calculated by looking at data from IMPLAN and Statistics Canada data on average margins in the semiconductor and electronics retail industries. These in turn were applied to data for Intel’s total sales in Canada, provided by Intel itself.
Productivity Impact of Intel Technology
- Our headline estimate of the productivity impact of Intel CPUs is an extrapolation of recent work by Azar (2022), which found that electronic miniaturisation accounted for between 11.74% and 18.63% of all TFP growth in the US between 1860 and 2019.
- We adjust the result from Azar(2022) for the Canadian account in two main ways:
- Producing an adjusted estimate for TFP growth in Canada. Measured TFP growth at the national level in Canada is heavily distorted by changes in the oil sector, leading to overall stagnation in the last 20 years. Loertscher and Pujolas (2023) estimate that net-of-oil TGP has grown instead at 0.6% per year, equivalent to 55% of overall Canadian growth in GDP per capita.
- Producing an estimate of Intel’s overall market share in Canada. We apportion the overall productivity impact in line with this market share:
- For our low end estimate, we use our estimate of Intel’s market share today
- For our high end estimate, we use a more speculative estimate of Intel’s market share over time.
- Our headline number uses the average of our low end and high end estimate.
- Our headline estimate of the number of Intel chips operating on a given day is the average of a low end and high end estimate:
- For our low end estimate, we build off our existing estimate of total chip volume sold in Canada, combined with an assumed average replacement rate across segments of 6 years (drawing from Statista data).
- For our high end:
- For server chips, we extrapolate off IDC data on total number of annual chips sold, assuming a 5 year replacement cycle and that chips operate everyday