Ottawa is moving fast on sovereign AI infrastructure, but it’s worth pausing to ask if they have a clear idea of what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
The federal government opened a one-month intake window for proposals to build “sovereign, large-scale AI data centres with a total capacity of about 100 megawatts.” The 2025 budget set aside $925.6 million over five years for new sovereign AI compute infrastructure.
While 100 megawatts might sound like a lot, it’s worth putting the scale in perspective: Meta is currently building a single AI data centre in Texas with a planned capacity of one gigawatt — ten times larger than the projects that Canada is contemplating. OpenAI is issuing press releases about “Project Stargate” which is touted to be in the range of US$500 billion, 10-gigawatt AI compute infrastructure.
So this is a very high-stakes poker game we’re getting into. The 100MW threshold matters because it’s a common threshold for "hyperscale" facilities. These require a huge, continuous electricity demand. One of the pointed questions that the government asks on their intake form is: “Do you have electricity supply agreements either in place or being negotiated?”
But what caught our eye in the government’s intake form was the “sovereign” language.
They ask if the proposed data centre will be built on Canadian soil. They want to hear about Indigenous participation, and they want to know if the projects have Canadian suppliers feeding into their technology stack.
These are all valid categories, but they are incomplete.
We encountered the same toward the end of 2025 when taking a close look at the government’s “Buy Canadian” policy — which rests on a definition that allows companies to qualify as “Canadian” even if they’re not headquartered in Canada and they’re not majority owned by Canadians.
The optimistic take here is that Ottawa is trying to course correct with the sovereign AI data centres: The intake form explicitly asks if the proponent is majority owned by Canadians. But if Canada still doesn’t have a clean, operational definition of “sovereign AI” then that ambiguity risks turning “sovereignty” into a vibes-based label that’s easy to market and hard to enforce.
One concern we’ve got as the government presses onward with the infrastructure buildout is that Canada may be at risk of focusing too much at the low-value end of the stack. Data centres can generate economic activity through short-term construction, but the harder question is value capture: Where do profits, IP, data and control accrue? Politicians tend to care about jobs, but these data centres don't employ many people for ongoing maintenance and operations.
