The Prime Minister says cloud infrastructure is vital for security, artificial intelligence and quantum leadership.
Prime Minister Mark Carney will ask his newly created Major Projects Office (MPO) to help develop a “Canadian sovereign cloud.”
Carney announced that intention while laying out the MPO's first priorities in Edmonton on Thursday. Although sovereign cloud is not mentioned in the MPO official project lisIn his address, Carney provided some details.
“This will build the computing capacity and data centers we need to support Canada's competitiveness, protect our security and strengthen our independence and sovereignty.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney
“This will build the computing capacity and data centers we need to support Canada's competitiveness, protect our security and strengthen our independence and sovereignty,” Carney said. “This will give Canada independent control of cutting-edge computing power while strengthening our leadership in artificial intelligence and quantum technologies.”
BetaKit has reached out to the Prime Minister's Office, the MPO and Single Economy Canada for more details.
MPO started at the end of August. Its headquarters are in Calgary and its goal is to open offices in other major Canadian cities. Its mandate is to streamline regulatory approvals and coordinate funding for “nation building projects” developed by the Prime Minister's Office.
Early MPO projects include liquefied natural gas pipelines, nuclear reactors, and expansion of mines and the Port of Montreal. There are also potentially transformative “early stage” strategies that the Prime Minister says need to be advanced through the MPO, including in the areas of critical minerals, high-speed rail, carbon capture and the Canadian sovereign cloud.
“Collectively, these projects have the potential to bring transformational benefits to Canadians, boosting economic growth, job creation and income for decades,” Carney said.
Creating independent AI and cloud infrastructure was one of the federal Council of Canadian Innovators' (CCI) 2025 plans. pre-budget recommendations. CCI President Ben Bergen told BetaKit in an email that his organization will measure Carney's success by whether government procurement helps Canadian companies grow.
“It’s encouraging that Prime Minister Carney views cloud sovereignty as a national imperative on par with pipelines and ports,” Bergen said. “We need to build sovereign digital rails to ensure we have firm control over our data and our digital commerce.”
Sovereign data has become subject of conversation among Canada relationship change with the United States (USA), which itself has invested multibillion-dollar deals for the construction of data centers. At a French Senate hearing earlier this year, Microsoft did not guarantee that it would not share French citizens' data with U.S. authorities without explicit permission, company officials said. Canadian cybersecurity in context. This raises questions about the security of Canadian data hosted on American-owned servers.
The Canadian government took some steps on this front last year, launching a program Sovereign AI Computing Strategy. The strategy allocated C$2 billion for AI computing capacity and the expansion of commercial AI data centers in Canada.
The private sector, as well as telecommunications giants, also joined the action. Bell And Telus commit to building sovereign data centers. French cloud provider OVHcloud is “actively engaging with the federal government in ongoing discussions around digital sovereignty,” the company's vice president for the Americas, Estelle Azemard, told BetaKit in an emailed statement following Carney's announcement.
Image courtesy of Prime Minister Mark Carney via X.
