AI experts argue the country’s structural advantages are finally becoming urgent strategic assets.
Dr. Alejandro Adem is president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a mathematics professor at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Arvind Gupta is a professor and academic director in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He was also a member of the federal government’s AI Strategy Taskforce.
During the great space race of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy declared: “For the eyes of the world now look into space… we set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won.” He was speaking about more than a moonshot. He was describing a technological frontier that would shape economic and geopolitical power for a generation.
Today, that frontier is AI, a technology as transformative as the steam engine or the internet. It will determine which nations lead in productivity, defence, scientific discovery, and global information systems. And while the United States and China currently dominate the field, Canada is far closer to contention than our national modesty might allow us to believe.
Canada’s structural advantages are finally becoming urgent strategic assets.
Building advanced AI at scale depends on four essential inputs. First and foremost, talent and ideas. Breakthroughs begin in universities and research institutes, where well-funded environments attract leading thinkers and ambitious graduate students. Companies cluster around this talent, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of innovation, commercialization, and growth.
Computing power, energy and natural resources, and capital complete the picture. AI requires massive processing capacity, reliable low-carbon power, critical minerals, and firms capable of sustained multibillion-dollar investment.
Canada has been exceptionally strong on talent. Federal funding through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the 1980s and 1990s supported research into neural networks and machine learning, long before AI entered the mainstream. Those investments enabled breakthroughs by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Richard Sutton, whose work underpins much of modern AI.
Where Canada lags is in compute infrastructure and late-stage capital. Compared with other G7 countries, Canada hosts a small share of advanced AI infrastructure, forcing organizations to rely on foreign providers. This can mean higher costs and, in sensitive sectors such as healthcare, government, and finance, legitimate concerns about data ownership and security. Just as limited compute constrains innovation, a lack of domestic capital restricts scale, often pushing promising startups to sell or expand abroad.
We can build ecosystems that retain talent, create world-leading technologies, and generate the next generation of anchor firms—not by trying to outspend superpowers, but by drawing them to our shores and leveraging the strengths only Canada possesses.
History shows us that anchor firms matter. When Fairchild Semiconductor established itself in California’s Santa Clara Valley in the late 1950s, it trained engineers who went on to found Intel, AMD, and dozens of other firms nearby. Those spin-offs, known as the Fairchildren, formed what became Silicon Valley. Talent, capital, and suppliers clustered in one region, reinforcing one another. Canada does not yet have enough domestic anchor firms to generate that effect at the speed required.
This is where strategic international investment, paired with domestic action, can transform the landscape. Microsoft has committed billions to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in Canada, while NVIDIA, AMD, and DeepMind maintain Canadian offices and engineering operations supporting AI research.
When global firms invest in Canada rather than simply recruiting Canadian graduates abroad, the benefits compound. Skilled jobs are created, suppliers scale, and experienced engineers eventually launch Canadian firms. If we pair international investment with sovereign compute, intensive IP development and deployment, and supportive policy frameworks, Canada can generate its own Fairchildren and end up being the one to watch in this race.
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What makes our odds particularly good is that Canada’s structural advantages are finally becoming urgent strategic assets. People want to live here. Our stability, democracy, and quality of life are not soft factors; they are magnets for global talent in a world where geopolitical risk increasingly shapes where top engineers and founders choose to build. The AI race is still in its early stages, and early stages are when dark horses emerge.
If we align our research strength with infrastructure investment, strategic global partnerships, and domestic industrial policy that bolsters homegrown intellectual property, Canada can convert global investment into domestic advantage. We can build ecosystems that retain talent, create world-leading technologies, and generate the next generation of anchor firms—not by trying to outspend superpowers, but by drawing them to our shores and leveraging the strengths only Canada possesses.
The world assumes this race has only two contenders. It would be a mistake to count Canada out.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Jason Hafso.