A Meta data center Alberta project worth thirteen billion dollars sounds like a win for Canadian business, but Emily Osborne makes the case for why the price tag is the least important number in the story.
Osborne breaks down the gap between investment and actual digital sovereignty, explaining why a data center built to serve an American company’s surveillance apparatus does nothing for Canadian control over Canadian data. She draws a direct line to telecom and aviation, industries where Canada has long protected domestic ownership, and asks why cloud computing and AI infrastructure haven’t been held to the same standard.
The conversation lands on the real risk: a foreign-owned data center answers to a foreign government first, and that includes the power to shut it off.
Topics: Meta data center Alberta, Canadian digital sovereignty, foreign owned data centers, AI infrastructure guardrails, data center ownership risk
GUEST: Emily Osborne
Originally aired on2026-07-10
