Toronto: A Booming Tech Hub

Silicon Valley, be warned! Toronto is now an emerging hub for technology innovation.  The New York Times reports that Microsoft opened a new office near a 50-story glass tower in downtown Toronto in late February. It’s a block away from Scotiabank Arena, the home of the Raptors and the Maple Leafs. And the massive Toronto tech boom continues.

Ahead of Microsoft’s expansion, Amazon and Apple already occupied towers in the area. Meanwhile, Google will soon open a new office around the corner. Meta (formerly Facebook) doesn’t have an office in downtown Toronto. But local start-ups complained that Meta was driving tech salaries to Silicon Valley level as it recruited top engineers across the city. According to the report, the social media company has hired anyone willing to work remotely during the pandemic. 

Construction workers were seen working on three floors of new office space just a few blocks north of downtown. It was reserved for another social media firm Pinterest. Stripe, an American payments company, is preparing for an office near City Hall. Earlier, Klama, a Scandinavian payments company, announced its arrival, evidenced by a photo op with Mayor John Tory. 

The Toronto Tech Boom and the Rise in Tech WorkForce 

As the tech industry grows, communities worldwide compete for tech workforce resources outside Silicon Valley. Many executives, investors, and entrepreneurs are eyeing warmer regions like Austin and Miami as the future big tech towns. However, they are small tech communities compared with the new hubs expanding along the shores of Lake Ontario.  

Local universities, government agencies, business leaders, and Canada invested in technology development for many years. These investments, coupled with Canada’s liberal immigration policies, have made Toronto the third-largest tech town in North America. It is now home to more tech workers than Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, DC. 

The city’s tech workforce is also growing faster than any innovation hub in the United States. And unlike other cities, Toronto is likely to supply the human resource needed to sustain the trend. 

“Everyone points to Miami as the next tech hub due to its low taxes. But it has limited potential from a tech point of view. You need anchor companies that can provide a transformative impact.” – Mike Volpi, Index Ventures. 

These anchor companies, including the Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, have come to Toronto. It is because of researchers and engineers who are already here. Additionally, they believe the talent pool will grow.

Tristan Jung worked for six years at the Twitter San Francisco office and recently convinced the company to build an engineering hub back home in Canada.

“This is now a place to make a long-term bet, that is to build connections with the cluster of schools in the area and create a new pipeline for hiring,” said Tristan Jung, a Korean-born computer scientist who grew up in Toronto

In 2021, Twitter hired more than 100 engineers in Toronto. Likewise, household internet names such as DoorDash, eBay, and Pinterest established similar tech hubs in the city. Rising AI companies like Cerebral, Groq, and Recursion Pharmaceutical also opened offices in Toronto. 

The new University of Toronto facility will become a hub for technology research in Canada. 

In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students published a research paper involving “neural networks.” It is a technology that could power everything from self-driving cars to digital assistants to chatbots. Soon, the world’s biggest companies invested millions in hiring expert researchers.

Google paid $44 million for Dr. Hinton, and he worked at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters. But he remained as a professor at the university. Then in 2016, he opened a Google research lab in downtown Toronto. He received several more research funding in the succeeding years. 

Driven by the pandemic immigration policy and other factors, many other tech giants have followed Google and Uber into Toronto. Some of them expanded their existing operations in and around the city. Also, local venture capitalists like Jordan Jacobs believe this will fuel the growth of a much larger start-up ecosystem in the city.