President Donald Trump’s recent trip to the United Arab Emirates sent a powerful message about the global race for artificial intelligence—and where the world’s emerging centres of power may lie. In a series of landmark deals valued at over $200 billion, Trump backed partnerships between U.S. tech giants and Gulf state champions that will see a vast new AI campus built in Abu Dhabi and hundreds of thousands of high-performance Nvidia chips shipped to the region. While the White House touted the agreements as a win for U.S. influence and industry, they also raised questions about how strategic technologies are being deployed—and who ultimately controls them.
The implications for Canada are clear. While the United States is aggressively securing AI supply chains, compute power, and global partnerships, Canada is still struggling to commercialize its early research advantages.
For a country that helped lay the foundations of modern AI, the lack of domestic infrastructure and policy urgency is becoming increasingly problematic. Just as Trump was cutting ribbons in Abu Dhabi, Canada was introducing its first-ever Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation: Evan Solomon, a first-time MP and former broadcaster tasked with turning Canada’s research strength into commercial scale.
Solomon’s appointment is a welcome recognition that AI is now a core economic and security issue. But if Canada wants to compete with countries like the U.S. and UAE, rhetoric alone won’t be enough.
For all its success in academic AI research, Canada has failed to turn that advantage into commercial power. Just seven per cent of the intellectual property generated by the government’s Pan-Canadian AI Strategy is owned by Canadian companies. Too often, taxpayer-funded innovations scale elsewhere, creating prosperity abroad while leaving Canadian firms trailing.
To date, Canada’s AI efforts have been too diffuse and too slow, failing to prioritize the areas that will actually move the needle: scaling homegrown companies, owning the intellectual property they create, and building sovereign infrastructure that ensures Canadian data remains under Canadian control.
In that context, the deals announced during Trump’s Gulf tour should be a wake-up call. While the U.S. government clears the runway for private firms to deploy compute infrastructure in foreign markets—and simultaneously secures reciprocal investment in domestic data centres—Canada is still debating how to stand up its own sovereign cloud and compute capacity.
At the centre of this effort is an often-overlooked challenge: data sovereignty. The location of data storage is not enough if Canada doesn’t control access. Many Canadian government departments and firms still rely on U.S.-based hyperscalers—tech giants whose infrastructure, even when located on Canadian soil, remains subject to American law.
That includes the U.S. Cloud Act, a 2018 law that compels U.S. companies to provide American authorities with access to data stored on their servers, regardless of where that data is physically located.
In practice, this means that if a Canadian hospital or government department uses a U.S. cloud provider to store sensitive data—even in a data centre in Toronto or Montreal—that data can be accessed by U.S. authorities without Canadian consent. It’s a sovereignty vulnerability hiding in plain sight, and it underscores why digital infrastructure is not just an economic priority but a national security imperative.
Solomon must now deliver results where others have made promises. That means making Canada’s federal government the world’s best customer for Canadian innovation, reforming outdated procurement systems, and tying public research dollars to commercialization plans that actually benefit the Canadian economy.
Trump’s trip to the Gulf has accelerated the global AI arms race. Canada has talent, ideas, and momentum—but we’ve been slow to act. With a new Minister and a mandate to innovate, the time for incrementalism is over.
The opportunity is still ours to seize. But it won’t last forever.
Daniel Perry is the Director of Federal Affairs at the Council of Canadian Innovators, leading national advocacy and engagement efforts. With experience in consulting and roles at the Senate of Canada, Queen’s Park, and the Canadian Criminal Justice Association, Daniel has helped political leaders and clients across various sectors achieve their public policy goals. A frequent media contributor and seasoned campaigner, Daniel holds a Master of Political Management from Carleton University.
