Prime Minister Mark Carney will ask his newly launched Major Projects Office (MPO) to help develop a “Canadian sovereign cloud.”
Carney announced the intention while outlining the MPO’s inaugural priorities in Edmonton on Thursday. While the sovereign cloud is not mentioned on the MPO’s official project list, Carney provided some details in his address.
“This would build compute capacity and data centres that we need to underpin Canada’s competitiveness, to protect our security, and to boost our independence and sovereignty.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney
“This would build compute capacity and data centres that we need to underpin Canada’s competitiveness, to protect our security, and to boost our independence and sovereignty,” Carney said. “This will give Canada independent control over advanced computing power while reinforcing our leadership in AI and quantum.”
BetaKit has reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office, the MPO, and the Ministry for the One Canadian Economy for more details.
The MPO launched at the end of August. Headquartered in Calgary, with the intention of creating offices in other major Canadian cities, its mandate is to streamline regulatory approval and coordinate financing for “nation-building projects” set out by the Prime Minister’s Office.
The MPO’s inaugural projects include liquid natural gas pipelines, nuclear reactors, as well as expanding mines and the Port of Montréal. There are also potentially transformative “early-stage” strategies that the prime minister said needed development through the MPO, including in critical minerals, high-speed rail, carbon capture, and the Canadian sovereign cloud.
“Taken together, these projects can deliver transformational benefits to Canadians, driving growth and jobs and income for decades,” Carney said.
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Building sovereign AI and cloud infrastructure was among the Council of Canadian Innovators’ (CCI) 2025 federal pre-budget recommendations. CCI president Ben Bergen told BetaKit in an email that his organization will judge Carney’s success on whether the government’s procurement propels the growth of Canadian companies.
“It’s encouraging that Prime Minister Carney sees sovereign cloud as a national imperative on a par with pipelines and ports,” Bergen said. “We need to be building sovereign digital rails to ensure that we are in firm control of our data and our digital commerce.”
Sovereign data has become a talking point amidst Canada’s changing relationship with the United States (US), which itself has loaded up multibillion-dollar deals to build data centres. In a Senate hearing in France earlier this year, Microsoft would not guarantee that it wouldn’t transmit French citizens’ data to US authorities without explicit authorization, according to Canadian Cyber in Context. This raises questions about the security of Canadian data hosted on American-owned servers.
The Canadian government made some movement on this front last year when it launched the Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. The strategy earmarked $2 billion CAD for AI computing power and the expansion of commercial AI data centres in Canada.
The private sector has got in on the action as well, with telecommunication giants Bell and Telus committing to building sovereign data centres. French cloud provider OVHcloud is “actively engaging with the federal government on the ongoing discussions around digital sovereignty,” the company’s vice-president of the Americas, Estelle Azemard, told BetaKit in an email statement following Carney’s announcement.
Feature image courtesy Prime Minister Mark Carney via X.