The Carney government plans to launch a new startup investment fund that takes direct government equity stakes in artificial intelligence companies as part of its national AI strategy, set for release this week, according to a source cited by The Globe and Mail and a draft document obtained by CBC News.
The new vehicle, called the Canadian Tech Growth Fund, will target smaller investments in domestic AI companies. It sits alongside the Canada Strong Fund — the sovereign wealth fund announced in the April Spring Economic Update with an initial $25 billion budget — which Ottawa will use for larger-scale investments in emerging Canadian “national champions,” the Globe source said. The tech growth fund also operates in addition to existing programs from the Business Development Bank of Canada and the Strategic Innovation Fund.
The strategy, titled “AI for All” in the draft, also calls for a top-up to the AI Compute Access Fund, a $300 million program that subsidizes computing costs for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses building AI products.
Ottawa disbursed $66 million to 44 companies through that fund earlier this month — its first round of payments since the program opened to applications in 2025. The draft cites a core problem the fund aims to address, which is that Canadian SMEs currently have “no affordable domestic option” for compute, forcing them to train and deploy AI models on foreign cloud platforms and send sensitive data and intellectual property outside the country.
Notably, adoption is a central pillar of the strategy. Only about 12% of Canadian businesses used AI in 2025, a figure the government aims to significantly increase. The draft strategy targets the creation of up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and projects that AI adoption will generate up to 250,000 new jobs across the economy by 2031.
It also commits to providing free AI literacy training to all Canadians. The government will further position itself as a “strategic anchor customer” for domestic AI scale-ups — a demand-side push that AI Minister Evan Solomon flagged at Web Summit Vancouver last month, telling the audience that Canadian companies would rather win a contract than receive a grant.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has also directed the federal Major Projects Office to develop sovereign cloud computing capacity to ensure Canadian-controlled infrastructure for building and running AI models. The draft strategy notes that foreign companies largely own and control Canada’s current data centre and cloud offerings, but says domestic players are entering the market.
The government presented the draft to cabinet last week, CBC reported, and Ottawa could still revise it before official release. The strategy has missed a series of deadlines — the government originally targeted a release before the end of 2025, then pushed it to the first quarter of 2026. Carney confirmed on May 27 that the strategy was “coming out next week.”
Canada’s AI research ecosystem has drawn significant investment since the government launched the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy in 2017, but the commercial gains from generative AI have flowed largely to US tech giants. The Carney government has framed the national strategy as the mechanism to close that gap.
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