Three big U.S. tech companies control the vast majority of Canada's publicly-available cloud infrastructure, says a new report released ahead of the government's national AI strategy, which is expected to include measures targeting AI sovereignty, The Canadian Press is reporting Tuesday.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google hold 85% of public cloud market share in Canada -- much higher than their global average of 66%, according to the report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project released Tuesday.
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.
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