Scale AI Expands Global AI Partnerships During VivaTech 2026 Mission
Scale AI led a mission of over 100 Canadian organizations to VivaTech 2026 in Paris, strengthening partnerships with European governments, research institutions, and technology firms. The initiative highlights growing cross-border cooperation in enterprise AI development and deployment.
VivaTech 2026, one of Europe's largest startup and technology events, is underway in Paris, bringing together startups, technology companies, investors, and policymakers to showcase how frontier technologies are increasingly moving from experimentation to real-world deployment. Among the most prominent participants is Scale AI, a Canadian organization that has spent a decade building the infrastructure that powers the world's leading AI models. Scale AI led a mission of over 100 Canadian companies and institutions to the conference, with the goal of strengthening partnerships with European governments, research organizations, and technology firms. The initiative signals that international AI collaboration is accelerating, even as geopolitical tensions reshape the global technology landscape.
"Scale was built on a belief that was unpopular: data matters as much as models and compute. Most frontier models today were originally built on the data, human feedback, and evaluation infrastructure that Scale spent a decade perfecting." – Scale AI
Scale AI's journey from a college dorm room idea to a cornerstone of the AI economy illustrates the maturation of the industry itself. The company began by doing work that most of the industry considered unglamorous: labeling data, creating datasets to capture edge cases, red-teaming models for safety, and building data pipelines from scratch. That foundational work proved essential. Scale partnered with Waymo years before self-driving cars reached the public, worked with OpenAI on InstructGPT a full year before ChatGPT's launch, and chose to work with the Pentagon in 2020 when defense tech was not yet a popular investment choice.
Today, Scale's track record is staggering: 15 billion human decisions applied to training leading AI models, development across 150 languages and locales, and over $1 billion paid to contributors worldwide. The company's reliability infrastructure is now embedded in hospitals, financial institutions, and national security environments where the margin for error is zero. This experience positions Scale to lead the reliable AI systems movement, which is becoming central to enterprise AI adoption.
The VivaTech mission aligns with Canada's broader strategy to foster international innovation partnerships. The Canadian International Innovation Program (CIIP) supports Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises in developing technologies with commercialization potential through international R&D collaborations. The program offers funding for partnership development activities, including networking and matchmaking events that can lead to joint R&D projects.
This initiative comes as Europe accelerates its own AI ambitions. The European Commission recently selected the EUROPA consortium to build an open-source frontier AI model covering all 24 official EU languages, demonstrating that Europe has the talent, infrastructure, and industrial capacity to develop advanced AI systems on its own infrastructure. Meanwhile, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is expanding Europe's AI capabilities with a network of AI Factories across 19 sites, offering European startups, SMEs, and researchers access to AI-optimized supercomputing resources.
The growing focus on practical AI deployment was reflected throughout VivaTech 2026. Unlike traditional generative AI systems that mainly respond to user prompts, AI agents that can perform tasks, interact with multiple software systems, and support business operations with greater autonomy were a central theme of the conference.
Canadian companies are actively building this capability. In a separate initiative, Bell Canada signed an AI infrastructure deal with Toronto-based Cohere to operate large language models through Bell AI Fabric using Canadian infrastructure. The agreement underscores the importance of sovereign AI infrastructure, ensuring that data remains located, operated, and governed in Canada. As Cohere's country manager for Canada noted, enterprises and governments need to know where models run, how data is protected, and whether technology can be deployed with the security and reliability their work requires.
