Ottawa was offering up to $700 million to attract private investment into Canadian AI data centres when it cancelled a planned July 2025 meeting with Brookfield, one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors.
The federal government has not explained why the meeting was removed from the calendar or why another date was never arranged, according to reporting by the Investigative Journalism Foundation.
An internal government note obtained by the IJF said the meeting was intended to “learn about Brookfield’s AI investment plans for facilities in Canada.” Senior Brookfield managers were expected to participate.
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The available information does not show that Brookfield had submitted a formal project, requested federal funding, or selected a Canadian location. It also does not establish that the cancellation stopped an investment from proceeding.
The significance lies in the timing and the investor involved. The federal government launched its Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy in December 2024, committing up to $2 billion toward domestic computing capacity.
That included up to $700 million for new or expanded Canadian AI data centres, up to $1 billion for public computing infrastructure, and up to $300 million to help smaller companies purchase access to computing resources.
Ottawa said the data-centre funding would support projects involving industry, academia, and private investors. It also said projects would be assessed partly on their expected return on public investment and sustainability.
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The government described the strategy as a way to encourage additional private capital to finance domestic computing capacity rather than relying entirely on public spending.
On June 25, 2025, shortly before the planned Brookfield meeting, Ottawa opened applications for its $300 million AI Compute Access Fund. The government again confirmed that up to $700 million had been allocated for private-sector, academic, and industry-led data-centre projects.
The Brookfield discussion would therefore have taken place as Ottawa was moving its AI infrastructure policy from announcements toward implementation.
Brookfield Asset Management had already demonstrated that it was prepared to deploy large amounts of capital into national AI infrastructure programs. In February 2025, Brookfield announced a €20 billion investment program in France. The plan included up to €15 billion for data centres and another €5 billion for supporting infrastructure, including electricity generation, data transmission, and chip storage.
In June 2025, one month before the planned Canadian meeting, Brookfield announced plans to invest up to SEK 95 billion in an AI infrastructure centre in Sweden. The Swedish project was expected to expand the site’s capacity from approximately 300 megawatts to 750 megawatts over 10 to 15 years, according to the company.
Brookfield was investing billions in AI infrastructure abroad. Ottawa had earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to attract similar capital to Canada. The two sides planned to discuss Canadian facilities.
Hence, the government cancelling the meeting has left us with no clues. The cancellation cannot be described as a rejected project because no disclosed project existed. It cannot be described as a lost investment because Brookfield has not said it withdrew Canadian plans.
It also cannot be established from the available record whether the meeting was cancelled for scheduling, policy, ethical, commercial, or administrative reasons.
Ottawa’s refusal to provide any reason leaves those questions unresolved.
The meeting also carried an unavoidable political sensitivity because Prime Minister Mark Carney had only recently left Brookfield. Carney joined the investment group in 2020, later serving as chair of Brookfield Asset Management and head of transition investing, before resigning on January 16, 2025, as he launched his Liberal leadership campaign. He was sworn in as prime minister on March 14, less than four months before the planned July meeting.
That same month, the federal ethics registry disclosed a screen preventing Carney from receiving information or participating in official matters involving Brookfield Asset Management, Brookfield Corporation, and their controlled companies.
