Canada bids to lead ‘middle powers’ on AI sovereignty

TL;DR:

  • Canada’s new “AI for All” strategy seeks to reduce reliance on US tech giants and treat AI as critical infrastructure.
  • It names the UK, Germany, France and the EU among allies in pursuing AI independence.
  • The plan stresses public trust, domestic data centres, chips and a sovereign compute base.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has launched a national AI strategy positioning Canada as a leader among the world’s “middle powers” as they race to build sovereign AI capability. Released on Thursday, the “AI for All” plan pledges to treat AI as critical infrastructure on a par with energy and defence, and to chart a path away from dependence on US tech giants in a field otherwise dominated by Washington and Beijing. Crucially, Ottawa concedes it cannot go it alone — and names the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Finland, Norway and the EU as like-minded partners.

Trust as the bottleneck

The strategy leans heavily on public confidence. Canada ranks near the bottom globally on AI training, literacy and trust, Carney acknowledged, and AI Minister Evan Solomon’s refrain — “adoption moves at the speed of trust” — runs through the plan. Ottawa intends to modernise privacy laws, legislate to protect children online and tackle deepfakes, while building Canadian-owned data centres, cloud infrastructure and semiconductor capacity, plus a supercomputer by 2031. Carney, who recently discussed AI ethics with Pope Leo XIV, framed the stakes bluntly: the question is “whether it will improve the lives of all Canadians or benefit only a few”.

For UK readers, the explicit naming of Britain as an ally is the notable detail. It positions the UK within an emerging bloc of middle powers hedging against US and Chinese dominance — a theme that runs parallel to the EU’s own technological sovereignty package unveiled this week. Both efforts share a diagnosis the UK knows well: research strength has not translated into commercial scale or infrastructure independence.

Looking forward

Carney’s plan replaces Canada’s 2017 strategy, which favoured research over commercialisation — a gap the new approach explicitly targets. Whether middle powers can build genuine alternatives, or merely coordinate procurement, will shape how much room countries like the UK have to set their own AI terms.

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