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Comment by rsingla | Hacker News Reader

I am fairly surprised to see they opened up in Edmonton, rather than Toronto, Montreal or even Vancouver.

Despite that, it's a huge win for UofA - especially when you have names like Rich Sutton involved. I am quite excited to see the excellent growth of AI/ML expertise in Canada considering the Vector Institute [0] was announced recently as well!

[0] - http://vectorinstitute.ai/

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In addition to the excellent people already at UofA, Edmonton has the advantage of being much cheaper than Toronto or Vancouver.

...or London.

Far less distractions too.

And pretty much in the middle of nowhere

(Also no worries about cooling hardware in winter, even compared to Toronto or Montreal)

Not sure how much HW in DeepMind is self-owned, or used "in the cloud" from GCP (or others), etc

It is actually almost on the flight path between San Francisco and London:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-LHR

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-LHR,+sfo-yeg,+yeg-lhr

quintessential "fly over" country. Being a medium-ish sized metro area, Edmonton doesn't have a lot of direct international flights.

To be fair, if Google cared about cost of living, they wouldn't keep and keep on building in the Valley so much.

Living condition in Edmonton is pretty terrible in the Winter. They still have snow up to May sometimes. But on the other hand, this might be perfect for research. Keeps you focused when there's nothing else to do. If it's a great workplace, might as well hang out at work all the time.

Google's domed / canopied campus ideas actually make sense in Edmonton. In Mountain View they're only protecting people from lovely weather.

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