Canada's 'AI for All' Strategy Bets Big on Sovereign Data Centres

Prime Minister Mark Carney and AI Minister Evan Solomon unveiled Canada's national AI strategy on Thursday, June 4. Branded "AI for All," it pairs a major push to build domestic computing power with new rules on privacy and surveillance pricing — and a plan to get far more Canadians and businesses using AI.

"Artificial intelligence, the defining technology of our era, is here," Carney said. The plan is ambitious in scope, but it lands amid sharp questions about jobs, the environment, and a notable absence of detail.

Why Canada is moving now

Canada has a homegrown AI research pedigree but a weak adoption record. Only 12% of Canadian businesses used AI between mid-2024 and mid-2025, the strategy document notes — a gap the government wants to close fast, targeting 60% business adoption by 2034.

There's also a sovereignty problem. According to the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, three U.S. firms — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — control 85% of Canada's public cloud market. The strategy frames domestic infrastructure as a matter of national control, not just economics.

Why this matters: Carney is arguing that prosperity in the AI era will belong to nations that build the technology "on their own terms" rather than renting it from foreign providers.

What's in the plan

The strategy is organized into six pillars, and the first is "protecting Canadians and safeguarding democracy." Ottawa says it will modernize privacy and online-safety laws to address AI harms like deepfakes and synthetic media, and add protections against AI-generated disinformation that could affect elections.

On consumer protection, Canada will table privacy legislation that safeguards children's information and explicitly bars using personal data for "surveillance pricing" — the practice of setting individual prices based on what a company infers you'll pay. Carney said child safety standards will be a Canadian priority at this month's G7 summit.

The government will spend $50 million to expand the Canadian AI Safety Institute and create a "Canada Trusted AI Certification" program to flag trustworthy products, addressing what the document calls a key barrier: low public trust.

The infrastructure bet

The boldest piece is hardware. Canada wants a "sovereign AI foundation" anchored by a "world-leading public supercomputer" and large-scale data centres that can scale to at least 100 megawatts each.

The target is 850 MW of computing capacity by 2030, with the government saying partnerships are "being finalized." That's a substantial commitment — and the part drawing the most public backlash, given data centres' heavy water and electricity demands.

On the business side, the plan adds $500 million through the Business Development Bank of Canada to help small and medium enterprises adopt AI tools, plus another $500 million to the Canadian Tech Growth Fund to help domestic startups scale and keep their talent and intellectual property in Canada. Ottawa will also spend $100 million standardizing health data sets, framing Canadians' data as a "strategic national asset."

The jobs question nobody answered

The strategy's biggest vulnerability is what it leaves out. During a technical briefing, officials were repeatedly asked how many jobs AI adoption would cost. They did not answer.

The document projects 250,000 new AI-related jobs by 2031 and commits to 90,000 placements for young Canadians, plus a "National AI Literacy Initiative." But it offers no estimate of losses — a striking gap given that Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem warned in February that AI may already be cutting entry-level jobs for young people.

What critics are saying

The opposition pounced. Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman called it "a very ambitious plan which lacks a lot of details," and disputed the job projections: "We don't believe the Liberals when they say that they'll create 90,000 jobs when we have lost more than 112,000 jobs just since January."

NDP Leader Avi Lewis pushed from the left, demanding "strong regulations to safeguard workers, youth, privacy, and our water and energy supply." His verdict: a document "heavy on hype, but light on the right guardrails." Public comments on the announcement ran heavily toward environmental and job-loss concerns.

What's next

The strategy is a framework, not finished legislation — much of it depends on bills, regulations, and standards still to be written. The privacy and online-safety laws are the pieces to watch, along with whether the promised data-centre "partnerships being finalized" produce concrete projects and named partners.

The G7 summit later this month is the next checkpoint, where Carney plans to push child-safety standards onto the international agenda. And the 850 MW capacity goal will be the clearest test of whether the sovereign-infrastructure ambition is real or aspirational.

Bottom line

Canada has planted a flag: build AI capacity at home, govern it by Canadian values, and get the whole economy using it. The vision is clear; the guardrails and the jobs math are not. If you're a Canadian business, the adoption funding is real money worth tracking — but the regulatory details that will define how you can use AI are still months from being written.