Amazon, Microsoft and Google maintain 85 per cent of public cloud market share in Canada — a lot larger than their international common of 66 per cent, in keeping with the report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Undertaking launched Tuesday.
The federal authorities is ready to launch an AI technique this week. It’s anticipated to name for constructing a basis for Canadian sovereign AI as one among its six pillars.
“AI for All will assist the constructing of sovereign compute infrastructure at scale — resilient, sustainable, and beneath Canadian governance, and develop Canada’s distinctive AI researchers and expertise pool,” the federal government mentioned within the spring financial assertion.
CBC reported Monday that in a draft model of the AI technique, the federal government acknowledged that knowledge centre and cloud choices in Canada are principally foreign-owned. It additionally mentioned it can take important funding to beat reliance on overseas suppliers of compute capability, CBC reported.
The Canadian Press has not seen the draft doc. A spokesperson for Synthetic Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon didn’t reply to questions concerning the technique Monday.
The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Undertaking report says there are political penalties to being depending on large U.S. corporations.
“Rising tensions in U.S.–Canada relations, the intermingling of Massive Tech pursuits with U.S. authorities energy, and the demonstrated willingness to make use of know-how entry as geopolitical leverage have pressured Canada and others to confront an uncomfortable actuality: dependence on a handful of U.S. hyperscalers is a sovereign danger in addition to a contest downside,” the report says.
Get breaking Nationwide information
Get breaking Canada information delivered to your inbox because it occurs so you will not miss a trending story.
The Canadian Press reported in September that since 2021, Ottawa has spent virtually $1.3 billion on cloud providers supplied by U.S. corporations, with many of the cash going to Microsoft.
In Canada, Amazon has a 42 per cent share of the cloud market, Microsoft holds 31 per cent, and Google has 12 per cent, in keeping with the report.
These corporations are “hyperscalers” — corporations which have the flexibility to offer computing sources on-demand globally. Which means companies that use their providers can scale up from only a few customers to thousands and thousands with out having to spend money on their very own infrastructure or signal knowledge centre contracts, the report says.
“The compute is obtainable immediately, billed by the second, and distributed throughout a worldwide community of information centres designed for redundancy and low latency,” it mentioned.
Hyperscalers have been on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s thoughts. In his broadly reported speech at Davos in January, he mentioned Canada is “co-operating with like-minded democracies to make sure we is not going to finally be pressured to decide on between hegemons and hyperscalers.” It’s an concept he has returned to repeatedly since.
The report says hyperscalers are dominant as a result of they supply one thing others can’t match.
“The worldwide attain, elastic scaling and wealthy ecosystem of platform providers they supply symbolize a long time of engineering funding and operational experience that no different class of supplier at present replicates at scale,” the report says.
It argues the federal government can step in to assist create competitors by making it simpler to change between suppliers.
Curtis McCord, a coverage analyst on the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Undertaking (CAMP), mentioned the federal government can also use its shopping for energy.
“And this doesn’t essentially imply that they should change who they’re doing enterprise with, however they should change the phrases on which they do enterprise” by solely shopping for applied sciences which can be interoperable or substitutable, McCord mentioned.
“What this does is it lowers the switching prices in case they ultimately need to change suppliers. As a result of each supplier that they work with could have a suitable system, as a result of interoperability will solely be in-built by distributors to fulfil the necessities of the contract,” he mentioned.
McCord mentioned he hopes that in its AI technique, the federal government sees “competitors as important from the very outset.”
The report says the federal government shouldn’t reply to the issue by merely directing funding to home telecom corporations.
“With out corresponding competitors coverage and regulation, directing public funds to Canada’s home telecommunications oligopolies with out clear conditionalities for interoperability based mostly on de facto requirements would merely switch market management to those corporations,” the report mentioned.
It calls such an consequence “a maplewashed dependency that replicates the structural issues of the present market with inferior efficiency.”
© 2026 The Canadian Press
Leave a Reply