US Big Tech Controls 85% of Canada’s Cloud Market
Canada is developing one of the world’s most active AI research ecosystems. The cloud infrastructure that those researchers and companies run on belongs almost entirely to three American corporations. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hold 85 per cent of the public cloud market share in Canada, much higher than their global average of 66 per cent, according to the report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project released Tuesday. Global News reported on June 2, 2026, that the timing of the report, released directly ahead of the federal AI strategy, was entirely deliberate.
Why the Gap Between Canada and the Global Average Matters
The federal government is set to release an AI strategy this week. It is expected to call for building a foundation for Canadian sovereign AI as one of its six pillars. The 19-percentage-point gap between Canada’s Big Tech cloud concentration and the global average is not a quirk.
It reflects an absence of domestic competition at a moment when cloud infrastructure is becoming the operating layer for national AI strategy. “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.
Canada Cloud Market Report Recommendations
The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project does more than describe the problem; it also warns Ottawa against the wrong response. Specifically, the report cautions against directing public funding to domestic telecom firms as a quick fix. Instead, it argues that without strong competition policy and clear regulatory conditions, such funding shifts control from foreign cloud providers to local oligopolies.
As the report explains, this approach transfers market power instead of reducing it. McCord also urges the government to treat competition as central from the start. In other words, replacing a foreign monopoly with a domestic one does not solve the sovereignty issue; it only repackages it.
At the same time, Canada’s cloud market issues and its AI strategy connect closely, even if people view them from different angles. On one hand, the problem appears clear; on the other hand, the strategy aims to address it. For example, Prime Minister Carney has tasked the Major Projects Office with building sovereign cloud capacity that supports Canadian-controlled AI infrastructure.
However, the draft strategy also notes that foreign firms still control most of the country’s cloud and data centre infrastructure, even as domestic players begin to grow. Meanwhile, Canada continues to strengthen its AI research base, with institutions like Mila, Vector Institute, and AMII producing significant talent.
The real question is whether that talent builds systems hosted in Canada or continues relying on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Ultimately, the outcome depends on whether policymakers align competition policy with funding decisions from the start rather than treating them separately.
