Great Northern Way Campus

Great Northern Way Campus Ltd (GNWC) is a private limited company and educational enterprise located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The company is the trustee of the Great Northern Way Campus Trust, whose stated purpose is to create "a centre of convergence for arts and culture, digital media and the environment.

No public money was spent, and the declared aim was "to cover the costs of future educational programs and buildings at the False Creek flats with revenues generated by private sector development.

As of 2012, GNWC President Matthew Carter claimed that its academic program would break even financially (previously it had been running a deficit in the order of $388,000 per year[5]), and the debt incurred from the site acquisition would be repaid.

[6] In January 2013, British Columbia premier Christy Clark announced the province's intention to fund a $130 million relocation of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design to the GNWC property.

From 2012 onwards, GNWC has had commercial tenants that are aligned with the Trust’s vision for the campus, including Scalar Decisions, Blackbird Interactive, GRAND (Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada), Discovery Parks’ Generator, Conquer Mobile, and Image Engine.

[8] In 2012, Image Engine partnered with Rainmaker Entertainment Inc. and Digital Domain and received financial backing from Toronto-based Scalar Decisions to set up a render farm at GNWC.

Dubbed ‘RenderCloud,’ the facility’s goal is to offer scalable, high-end VFX development capabilities to major movie studios, and prevent them from being lured away to competitors in countries such as New Zealand and England.

[10] For example, eatART, a charity that fosters new media art research with a focus on large-scale, kinetic and robotic sculpture, resides in a shop on the property.