Dispatch · Tech sovereignty
Mark Carney's government is obsessed with sovereignty, the idea that Canada controls its own technology instead of renting it from abroad. But the government's brand of sovereignty is remarkably adaptable. Strip the word away and you'll see billions in public money subsidizing American infrastructure.
We pay for it. We cool it with our water and power it off our grid. Somebody else owns it.
On June 4, 2026, Mark Carney stood at a podium in Toronto to launch Canada's national AI strategy entitled "AI for All." The pitch was sovereignty, the good clean homegrown kind, free of foreign entanglement. Carney referred to the concept at least ten times by name. For comparison, compute got seven mentions, and intelligence, a lowly one.
The Prime Minister told the room that Canada would be "masters of our own house" in the virtual world. Though it turns out that that house is mostly sublet.
Starting with the money, which no one could quite agree on, we were bombarded with figures ranging from $2 billion to $200 billion, depending on whether you were counting spending or daydreaming about growth. Independent tallies that looked at the existing programs being folded into the announcement landed north of $3.5 billion.
The ambiguity seems intentional. It may be the whole point.
It uses Carney's Build-Partner-Buy framework: build in Canada first, partner with allies if you can't build, and buy from abroad only, in Carney's words, after exhausting these options. Sovereignty as a waterfall, cascading politely from domestic to foreign.
The trouble is that the receipts run the waterfall backwards.
The largest near-term commitment goes to Cohere, which got up to C$240 million to build a data centre with CoreWeave, an American firm, on Nvidia chips. In other words, the flagship sovereignty play is American hardware running American silicon with a Canadian invoice stapled to the front.
Carney bragged in the same speech that Canada is one of only four countries with its own large language model. True. Though he failed to mention that the compute to run it largely isn't ours.
The honesty as usual is in the fine print. The Compute Access Fund is described in its own terms as a subsidy so Canadian firms are "not entirely dependent on American hyperscalers."
Not entirely. That qualifier is the most accurate word in the whole strategy, and it's doing its accurate work two clicks below the headline where nobody reads.
The strategy's other cost doesn't show up in the funding tables. The data centres it wants built have to be cooled, and cooling runs on water. Two Microsoft facilities in southern Ontario have already been cleared to draw municipal drinking water, one in Toronto's west end approved for about 1.2 billion litres a year, another in Vaughan for 730 million. In Alberta, where many of the biggest builds are landing, an investigation found three-quarters of planned sites sit in high-water-stress areas.
The EU made data centres report their water and energy use in 2024; a Dutch province froze new builds over drinking-water shortages. Canada is racing into the same boom with almost nothing on the books to track it. Reporting requirements are friction, and friction is off-brand during an announcement.
A 300-megawatt build outside Regina, anchored by CoreWeave and an American chip firm, will draw on a Saskatchewan grid that still runs on gas and coal. The "energy superpower" line leans on a national figure, about 84 percent non-emitting, that flattens where the new load actually lands.
The contrast was almost too neat. The same day Carney stood in Toronto promising sovereign AI by the billion, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew refused it. A hyperscale data centre pitched for farmland south of Winnipeg, backed by a Las Vegas firm and a Vancouver one, would have burned natural gas around the clock and drawn 500 megawatts, roughly three hundred times the Manitoba government's entire computing load.
Kinew looked at it and said hyperscale data centres "don't appear to be in the best interests of Manitobans." The clearest exercise of sovereignty that day, a government deciding on its own terms what it would and wouldn't build, came from the premier saying no, not the prime minister saying yes.
Quantum tells the same story in a different costume. Canada's National Quantum Strategy is backed by $360 million over seven years, against Germany's roughly $2.8 billion CAD and France's €1.8 billion. The government's own consultations warned that the funding "may be insufficient to achieve the goals," which is the polite federal way of filing a complaint against yourself.
D-Wave, founded in British Columbia, now answers to Florida. Xanadu merged with a Nasdaq shell and arranged to raise up to US$300 million from a firm tied to the Trump family. Canada keeps the labs and exports the upside.
Budget 2025 added $334.3 million and reclassified it from the science budget to the Defence Industrial Strategy. The funding rationale just migrated to whichever department had political appetite that fiscal year.
Carney opened the speech by quoting Pope Leo XIV on artificial intelligence: never has humanity had such power over itself. The complication is that the power, the compute, the chips, the capital, the founders, mostly sits somewhere else.
The word "sovereign" turns an industrial subsidy into a geopolitical virtue years before any silicon is poured. The compute strategy concedes its dependence in its own grant language. The quantum strategy filed its own insufficiency in the consultation record.
The announcement is the only part reliably manufactured in Canada.
Everything else is eventual, notional, and subject to negotiation.