Health data and AI: GPUs hosted in Canada

What hosting in Montreal settles

• A single region, canada-montreal: no GPU Cloud server can be launched outside Canada, even through a configuration mistake.
• The records, medical images or notes you copy to the server are stored on its disk, in Canada, and processed by its GPU, in Canada.
• The GPU is attached to your server only; it is not shared with other customers while your server runs.
• What may leave Quebec: your account information (identity, billing, e-mails), as the privacy policy explains, not the content of your servers.

What hosting does not settle

Where the servers are is one part of the file, not the whole file. Depending on your province and status, other rules apply: in Quebec, the Act respecting health and social services information; in Ontario, the Personal Health Information Protection Act. Your privacy officer remains the right person for the privacy impact assessment.

• De-identify or pseudonymize the data before copying it to the server, when the project allows it.
• Transfer files over SSH (scp, rsync), and limit access to the server to named SSH keys.
• You are the server’s administrator: encrypt data at rest with the tool of your choice if your policy requires it.
• At the end of the project, delete the server and its volumes.

What a GPU is used for in health

• An open LLM that summarizes or structures clinical notes without sending them to a third-party API: see self-host an LLM with vLLM or Ollama on a GPU.
• Training or inference of medical imaging models (segmentation, classification) with PyTorch and CUDA.
• Adapting a model to internal data, with LoRA or QLoRA: see the fine-tuning guide.

The GPUs to serve an LLM, with their availability

For an organization’s needs (several GPUs, bank transfer, questions on where data is kept), describe them on the business and research page: a person from our team answers by e-mail. The details on where data is kept are on the data sovereignty page.

Good to know before you launch

• Billing is hourly, at the server’s hourly rate, from prepaid credit. There is no per-minute billing, and the first hour is charged when you deploy.
• A stopped server is still billed at the full hourly rate. To pay less, hibernate it ($0.02 per hour (about $14.60 per month), disk kept) or delete it. A Spot machine cannot be hibernated: delete it when you are done.
• The minimum top-up is CA$25.00, paid by credit card.
• Servers and their disks stay in Canada (region canada-montreal, in Montreal). Account information (identity, billing, e-mails) may be processed outside Quebec, as the privacy policy explains.

Frequently asked questions