When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced AI for All, the new federal artificial intelligence strategy, he was specific about how the country could secure its place in the defining technology of the era.

“Just as in our Defence Industrial Strategy, we will follow a Build-Partner-Buy Framework,” he told an audience at Toronto’s University Health Network. That means building in Canada first, partnering with allies where we cannot build and “only after exhausting these options, will we buy from abroad.”

The ambition is measurable: $200 billion in new growth, 250,000 jobs and a pledge to lift business AI adoption to 60 per cent by 2034 from about 19 per cent at launch of the strategy.

However, while borrowing the build-partner-buy sequence from the defence industrial strategy is a good instinct, it works only for some layers of AI.

Canada doesn’t need AI independence. It needs exit plans for critical sectors Canada’s got AI talent. Let’s keep it here

Canada doesn’t need AI independence. It needs exit plans for critical sectors

Canada’s got AI talent. Let’s keep it here

AI is not one thing. It is a complex stack. In a simple sense, silicon chips sit at the bottom, compute and cloud infrastructure in the middle, frontier models above that, and the applications and agents that people use on top.

Build-partner-buy is the right order for the middle of that stack, the infrastructure layer, where Canada can play a meaningful role in the buildout of data centres. But for the top and bottom – the models and applications most Canadians will use and the chips Canada has no realistic prospect of producing at scale in this cycle – the order should flip to buy-partner-build.

Buy first because deploying and adopting the best available AI quickly often matters more than where it was made. Partner second to reduce dependencies, particularly beyond U.S. and Chinese supply chains. Build third where Canadian firms can create a defensible commercial moat or where government is handling particularly sensitive data, operating critical infrastructure or complying with national-security obligations.

The right idea, the wrong layers

The build-first approach works for infrastructure because data centres are the frigates of AI: capital-intensive, physical and slow to replace. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are estimated to hold 85 per cent of Canada’s public cloud market, well above their global average of 66 per cent, according to the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, a think tank.

Canada has the energy, land and expertise to build more data-centre capacity at home, which gives our country more leverage to ensure that data........

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