My latest at Forbes:
When a single American hyperscaler can drop $100 billion on AI infrastructure in a single year, what\u2019s a middle power supposed to do? Canada\u2019s answer, delivered at Web Summit Vancouver by the country\u2019s first-ever Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, isn\u2019t surrender. Nor is it a moonshot attempting to match U.S. spend dollar-for-dollar.
Instead, it\u2019s a softer declaration of digital independence \u2014 with an acknowledgment that independence doesn\u2019t necessarily mean isolation.
\u201cSovereignty is not solitude,\u201d Minister Evan Solomon said at the Vancouver Convention Centre. \u201cWe are going to do business with the United States. They are our biggest customer.\u201d
Solomon announced 44 new projects across British Columbia receiving up to $66 million through Canada\u2019s Compute Access Fund, a $300-million program he says is \u201cwildly oversubscribed.\u201d The goal: Canadian data centers serving Canadian companies and citizens. The fund subsidizes 50 cents on the dollar for compute access, rising to 67 cents when that compute is Canadian.
Canada\u2019s strategy rests on four pillars: talent, energy, capital, and partnerships. On talent, Solomon noted that \u201cWaterloo is graduating more engineers than Stanford\u201d and that Canada\u2019s last budget committed $1.7 billion to attract 1,000 of the world\u2019s top AI researchers \u2014 the largest such program in the G7. On energy, Canada has \u201cthe largest clean energy grid, lots of it unused\u201d \u2014 a critical advantage for power-hungry AI chips.
Capital remains a challenge. But on partnerships, Canada\u2019s sovereign technology alliance with Germany is building \u201can alternative to either the hyperscalers or the hegemons.\u201d The point isn\u2019t to beat OpenAI \u2014 it\u2019s to give Canadian companies and citizens a real choice that doesn\u2019t put their data under foreign jurisdiction.
On the foundation model front, Solomon made a bold claim: \u201cThere\u2019s only four countries in the world that have a foundation model: the U.S., China, France with Mistral, and Canada with Cohere.\u201d Canada has invested over a quarter of a billion dollars in Cohere, which hit $240 million in ARR in 2025 and recently announced an acquisition of German AI firm Aleph Alpha valuing the combined entity at roughly $20 billion.
Per capita foreign direct investment into Canada has run at roughly 2x the U.S. rate over the past year. Whether the strategy compounds into something lasting remains to be seen \u2014 but Solomon\u2019s framing is deliberately pragmatic.
\u201cWe\u2019re not team pom-poms. We\u2019re not team pitchfork. We\u2019re team pragmatic,\u201d he said.