American AI systems will often be the best tools available. Canada and Europe should use them when they make sense.
Nor would this be protectionism by another name. Strategic autonomy is not economic autarky. The point isn’t to wall off Canada or Europe from American technology. The point is to make sure democratic allies have enough infrastructure of their own to negotiate, cooperate and innovate from strength.
Friendship is not the same as dependency. Serious allies don’t build their future on the assumption that another capital will always say yes.
A Canada-Europe compact would start with jointly governed data centers in Canada, powered by clean electricity where possible, connected to European industrial demand, and structured so that neither U.S. nor Chinese entities can quietly become the controlling operators of the infrastructure meant to provide independence from them.
That last point matters. A data center in Canada is not automatically sovereign. If it is owned, operated, financed and controlled by a foreign hyperscaler, it may create jobs and tax revenue, but it doesn’t give Canada or Europe durable control over compute access. It is a foreign platform with a Canadian address.
The structure should be different for sovereign compute.
Canadian and European public funds, pension funds, industrial companies, model developers and cloud operators should jointly finance the facilities. Canadian and European entities should retain governing control. U.S. companies could participate as suppliers, customers or minority partners, but not dominate the sovereign layer. The facilities should include guaranteed compute allocations for Canadian and European AI firms, universities, hospitals, public agencies and critical industries.
Power access should come with conditions. Canada shouldn’t give away its grid advantage cheaply. Major AI data centers should be required to help pay for new generation and transmission, publish energy and water-use data, use clean power wherever feasible, include Indigenous and local participation, and train Canadian workers in the new trades of AI infrastructure: power engineering, liquid cooling, cybersecurity, data-center operations, fiber networking and chip maintenance.
This shouldn’t become a subsidy program for corporate electricity consumption. It should be an industrial strategy.
That won’t be easy. Canada is good at producing talent, energy and natural advantages. It is less good at turning them into coordinated national industrial strategy. Provincial power systems, federal procurement, Indigenous rights, environmental review, pension capital, immigration policy and national-security rules would all have to move in the same direction. That is precisely why the strategy has to be explicit. If Canada treats AI data centers as ordinary real estate projects, the country will drift into the weakest version of the opportunity.