“You are at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Prime Minister Mark Carney grimly observed after the recent collapse of trade negotiations with the United States.

Trump’s tariff and trade antics have revealed the threats of Canada’s close entanglement with the U.S. This raises the question of how protected Canada’s data is as we grapple with our increasingly hostile neighbour. 

The importance of safeguarding Canadian data was already a national priority before the latest U.S. trade spat. Carney announced last September that he would “task the Major Projects Office with assisting in the development of a Canadian Sovereign Cloud. This would build the compute capacity and data centres needed to underpin our competitiveness, protect our security, and boost our sovereignty.”

Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, declared that digital sovereignty is “the most pressing policy and democratic issue of our time.” 

Data sovereignty is the idea that countries should have the authority to defend and preserve digital information generated within their borders. Such cyber nationalism is an alleged rationale for a massive buildout of proposed gas-powered data centres in Alberta. But how Canadian is this new digital cloud? The mainstream media coverage has so far largely ignored this important question.

DeSmog analyzed the companies behind 26 proposed data centres as listed on the Alberta Major Projects site, as well as six projects under construction, and one that has been approved, using  publicly available data on Alberta Data Centre Watch and company websites.

DeSmog found only 10 – less than one third – of these projects could have full Canadian control over data. Fifteen of these projects have at least some degree of  U.S. control over data, 13 of those being 100 percent under U.S. control, and one including a Canadian developer but a U.S. tenant. The remainder are under the control of other foreign companies.

For instance, Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Valley AI Data Centre Park is proposed by O’leary Digital Limited (ODL), a recently incorporated Alberta company with two directors, Kevin O’Leary and Paul Palandjian – both based in the U.S. according to their Linkedin profiles. O’Leary Digital is based in Miami. An affidavit sworn by Palandjian in response to a lawsuit filed by the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation reveals the company proposing a $70 billion project was named 2664755 Alberta Limited until October 2025. U.S.-based Brian Inskeep is a lead investor according to an ODL press release.

Besides these multiple ties to America, O’Leary himself could hardly be called an elbows up Canadian nationalist. “Mr. Wonderful” famously mused on social media about negotiating an economic union with our menacing neighbour. “Think about the power of combining the two economies and erasing the border between Canada and the United States”, O’Leary enthused on X after Trump was elected in 2024.

Alberta is ground zero for Canada’s AI building bonanza, accounting for ninety percent of proposed data centre projects. There are 26 proposed data centres on the Alberta Major Projects list, almost all of them are set to be powered by natural gas.

After identifying the controlling or parent companies of the entities listed as project developers, DeSmog identified the companies that would operate and/or use the data centre facilities to focus on the entities that will likely control the data. Any data centre with a non-Canadian party holding control over data cannot be 100 percent data sovereign. Any degree of American-based ownership can put Canadian data at risk and despite pressing issues around our information safety, the specific partnership percentages of these projects are not made public.

The U.S. government can compel an American company that controls data  – regardless of location –  to release it to American regulators under the CLOUD Act (2018). 

According to recent analysis from Canadian law firm BLG, “Storing data in Canada does not, by itself, prevent access under foreign laws; who controls the data matters more than where it is located…Under the CLOUD Act, U.S. authorities may compel U.S.-based companies — or foreign subsidiaries under U.S. control — to produce data, even if that data is stored in Canada and relates to non U.S. persons.”

Natasha Tusikov, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, warned that even strong domestic privacy laws in jurisdictions like the European Union are apparently little protection from current U.S. laws. “Under the CLOUD Act, any American entity can be compelled to hand over its data, even if that data disclosure is in violation of other laws”, Tusikov told DeSmog.

Alberta is rapidly building an assortment of data centres with at least one U.S. developer/ operator.

Black Bear Power Project is a 466MW gas-powered data centre proposed by Teton Digital, based in Wyoming. DeSmog previously revealed that Teton is tied to a failed bitcoin mining venture that collapsed and left a roughly U.S. $1.1-million court judgment unpaid.

Beacon Data Centres is a Calgary-based company and the proponent behind six Alberta data centre projects totalling 4 GW of potential generating capacity including Indus Data Centre Hub, Heartland Artificial Intelligence Hub, Saunders Lake, Chestermere, Foothills and Harry Smith. According to the company’s website, Beacon was “Founded in 2023 by Nadia Partners, a specialist investor in AI, digital infrastructure”. Nadia is based in New York according to Linkedin and lists Beacon data centres as part of its investment portfolio.

U.S.-based social media giant Meta is proposing a $13 billion 1 GW data centre in Sturgeon County. Meta previously expressed its disdain for Canadian digital sovereignty by banning Canadian news stories on Facebook and Instagram in response to Canada’s Online News Act that requires tech giants to contribute to Canadian news outlets for reposting their content. The government of British Columbia publicly pleaded with Meta in 2024 to lift its ban so that citizens could have better access to potentially life-saving wildfire news. Meta, which posted a $134 billion gross profit that year, refused.

Based on companies listed on the Alberta Major Projects site, a significant number of data centres would likely provide no protection if American regulators decided they wanted to paw through Canada’s information underwear drawer.

At a virtual town hall on data centres last week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith promoted Meta’s data centre and said “one of our considerations is the data has to be stored and processed somewhere and we think that in the interest of data sovereignty, it’s best for that to be stored here.” In fact, Canadians impacted by increased emissions and additional demands on our electrical grid and water supplies will seemingly realize almost no benefit to our digital privacy.

Even if all new data centres were Canadian-owned, this would still do little to protect our digital sovereignty. Software platforms used every day by Canadian governments, institutions, and businesses such as Microsoft, Google, and Zoom are based in the U.S. and are subject to many of the same same legal vulnerabilities as American-owned server farms. An analysis by Upper Harbour looked at 780 professional software tools typically used in Canada and found that 88 percent were at risk under the CLOUD Act and only fewer than one in five were Canadian owned.

Tusikov flagged the possibility that U.S. tech giants may choose to comply with government demands whether they are legally compelled to or not. “These U.S. tech companies have pledged their fealty publicly, repeatedly to the Trump administration, and to Trump himself. That’s a huge problem.”

A senior Microsoft executive admitted under oath to the French Senate in 2025 that the company could be compelled to provide European data to the U.S. government under the CLOUD Act. Tech giant Alphabet recently demonstrated their obedient compliance to the Trump Administration by promptly changing the label for Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on Google Maps following the President’s latest display of geographic pique. Apple, whose company motto is “think different”, quickly followed suit.

Many of the proposed data centres do not have tenants announced yet. It remains unclear as to whether the data at a centre leased by a Canadian tech company but constructed by an American company could be compelled under the U.S. CLOUD ACT.

According to Tusikov, the specific legalities may be less important under increasingly erratic American politics. “Trump has repeatedly shown that he operates through coercive pressure and disregards the law. In this scenario, I would argue the law essentially doesn’t matter because if the Trump administration wanted the data, Trump wouldn’t hesitate to pressure companies to disclose data outside the law”, said Tusikov.

We have much work to do and experts believe the hard work to secure Canada’s information space is unimpressive so far. “I’m a big critic of Carney’s AI plan because it’s very vague”, said Tusikov. “It’s unclear what we’re building, what we’re making, what we’re doing…besides shifting a lot of people’s jobs over to chatbots and then essentially firing them.”

Progress is possible. Europe is slowly moving away from a dangerous dependence on U.S.-based online platforms even if this comes with added costs and operational challenges. Saskatchewan now is requiring all new data centres to be Canadian owned. Why isn’t this a requirement across the country? 

Carney is correct, Canada is at war. However, our country has barely begun to secure our digital sovereignty. Facilitating a massive and polluting buildout of mostly American-controlled data centres in Alberta may make this pressing problem even worse.