“Canada spent $4.4 billion on AI. The minister says the IP stays in Canada"

Here are the facts.

In December 2024, the Government of Canada finalized up to $240 million in funding for Toronto-based Cohere as part of a $725 million AI data centre project. According to public reporting by BetaKit, the facility is being built and operated by CoreWeave, a U.S. cloud computing company.

CoreWeave owns the servers.

CoreWeave controls the compute.

CoreWeave earns the operating revenue.

Cohere does not own the data centre. Canada does not own the data centre. And Canada does not own the compute layer that actually powers model training, scaling, and deployment.

“Canada spent $4.4 billion on AI.
The minister says the IP stays in Canada.
Here’s why that’s not true.

At committee this week, the minister defended the government’s $240 million AI funding decision by stating that the intellectual property created by Cohere “stays in Canada.”… pic.twitter.com/5JwJGjdfLO

— Slk55again (@slk55again)February 7, 2026

So we gave $240 million of taxpayer dollars to the Americans.

In artificial intelligence, IP does not meaningfully exist in isolation. The economic value is created through repeated training, fine-tuning, orchestration, and scaling, all of which depend on who controls the compute.

If you don’t control the compute:

• you don’t control cost curves

• you don’t control scaling

• you don’t capture the compounding value

If digital sovereignty is real, public AI funding must come with conditions:

• Canadian-governed compute for critical systems

• retained ownership, equity, or royalties when taxpayers fund infrastructure

• a modern definition of a “Canadian company” based on control, not branding

Otherwise, we repeat a familiar pattern:

public money, world-class talent… and long-term ownership accruing elsewhere.”

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