U.S. big tech holds 85% of Canadian cloud market, report says ahead of AI strategy

The federal government is set to release an AI strategy this week. It’s expected to call for building a foundation for Canadian sovereign AI as one of its six pillars.

“AI for All will support the building of sovereign compute infrastructure at scale — resilient, sustainable, and under Canadian governance, and grow Canada’s exceptional AI researchers and talent pool,” the government said in the spring economic statement.

CBC reported Monday that in a draft version of the AI strategy, the government acknowledged that data centre and cloud options in Canada are mostly foreign-owned. It also said it will take significant investment to overcome reliance on foreign providers of compute capacity, CBC reported.

The Canadian Press has not seen the draft document. A spokesperson for Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon did not respond to questions about the strategy Monday.

The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project report says there are political consequences to being dependent on big U.S. companies.

“Rising tensions in U.S.–Canada relations, the intermingling of Big Tech interests with U.S. government power, and the demonstrated willingness to use technology access as geopolitical leverage have forced Canada and others to confront an uncomfortable reality: dependence on a handful of U.S. hyperscalers is a sovereign risk as well as a competition problem,” the report says.

The Canadian Press reported in September that since 2021, Ottawa has spent almost $1.3 billion on cloud services provided by U.S. companies, with most of the money 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, according to the report.

These companies are “hyperscalers” — firms that have the ability to provide computing resources on-demand globally. That means businesses that use their services can scale up from just a few users to millions without having to invest in their own infrastructure or sign data centre contracts, the report says.

“The compute is available instantly, billed by the second, and distributed across a global network of data centres designed for redundancy and low latency,” it said.

Hyperscalers have been on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s mind. In his widely reported speech at Davos in January, he said Canada is “co-operating with like-minded democracies to ensure we will not ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.” It’s an idea he has returned to repeatedly since.

The report says hyperscalers are dominant because they provide something others can’t match.

“The global reach, elastic scaling and rich ecosystem of platform services they provide represent decades of engineering investment and operational expertise that no other class of provider currently replicates at scale,” the report says.

It argues the government can step in to help create competition by making it easier to switch between providers.

Curtis McCord, a policy analyst at the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP), said the government also can use its buying power.

“And this doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to change who they’re doing business with, but they need to change the terms on which they do business” by only buying technologies that are interoperable or substitutable, McCord said.

“What this does is it lowers the switching costs in case they eventually want to change providers. Because every provider that they work with will have a compatible system, because interoperability will solely be built in by vendors to fulfil the requirements of the contract,” he said.

McCord said he hopes that in its AI strategy, the government sees “competition as essential from the very outset.”

The report says the government shouldn’t respond to the problem by simply directing funding to domestic telecom companies.

“Without corresponding competition policy and regulation, directing public funds to Canada’s domestic telecommunications oligopolies without clear conditionalities for interoperability based on de facto standards would merely transfer market control to these firms,” the report said.

It calls such an outcome “a maplewashed dependency that replicates the structural problems of the current market with inferior performance.”