The American giant OpenAI has reportedly been in discussions with the federal government about building, or partnering on, AI data centres in Canada. Data centres like these are AI’s physical footprint, housing the high-performance hardware required to train and operate its models. The offer seemed, on the surface, like a win-win. Canada’s abundant clean-energy supply would feed OpenAI’s voracious demand for computing power, and OpenAI would help Canada achieve one of Mark Carney’s stated nation-building goals: expanding domestic AI capacity, which recently got a billion-dollar investment from the federal budget. Building AI data centres in Canada will create skilled jobs and anchor our national capabilities in a sector that’s become fundamental to economic competitiveness.

But that OpenAI offer also suggested, without providing much detail, that it can help with another of the Liberals’ AI ambitions: to build a “sovereign cloud.” Because Canada’s data infrastructure has long been owned and operated by foreign-controlled firms, the government intends to build AI infrastructure that’s operated and governed under Canadian law.

This is where OpenAI’s offer contradicts itself: the more Canada relies on foreign AI investment, the less control we’ll have over our own data. If Canada partners with foreign AI giants to accelerate our infrastructure build-out, we’ll gain their speed, scale and access to the frontier of computing technology. Yet we risk giving up something essential: the power to decide where data lives, how it is used and who captures its value. More and more, the ability to shape an economy depends on who controls the systems that turn data into knowledge. Canada’s economic strength will be determined by whether it builds that capacity at home or yields it to others.

The U.S. already has the advantage here. American laws like the CLOUD Act allow American authorities to access data held by U.S. companies, even when it’s........

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