Digital Infrastructure And Data Sovereignty As National Priority Projects

Torys' Canadian and New York offices will be providing regular briefs on the legal ramifications of the tariffs and other cross-border policy developments on the horizon.

In our recent brief, we discuss a range of potential national priority projects that satisfy Canada's key domestic and international trade goals and/or work to assert our sovereignty. One of the key project categories we identify is digital infrastructure and data sovereignty (e.g., data centres and broadband).

The gap in AI and digital infrastructure—and the push toward data sovereignty

When it comes to AI compute infrastructure, Canada trails every other G7 country and holds the lowest amount of publicly available computing infrastructure and performance, according to a recent report by The Dais, a public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University¹. The report goes on to say that apart from weakening Canadian competitiveness globally, this represents a domestic gap