U.S. Policy is Canada's Gain

davidcogd
1 day ago
2 min read

The Future of U.S. economic growth from AI Technology is dependent on key factors

· Energy Availability.

· Regulatory Restrictions.

· Capital Funding.

· Ease of Hiring Foreign Workers with Technology Skills.

The global potential for AI over the next 10 years is huge.

Unfortunately, U.S. policy is not advancing the potential.

First, the energy grid is in a critical situation. The high demand for electrical energy used by AI Data Centers is not available. (See the previous Cogport posts about the energy grid for detailed information).

Public Utilities and the Trump administration have declared that new AI Data Centers are “on their own” to find or produce the power needed.

The individual States in the U.S. are creating regulations that make it difficult to build a new Data Center.

The options for Data Centers are:

1. Purchase their own power generation plants which adds a lot of capital cost and time for implementation.

2. Develop new Data Centers in other countries with public power available.

3. Struggle to find Technology Workers that are not being produced by the U.S. Education System. The current U.S. Visa policy makes this difficult.

There is no unified U.S. policy to support this burgeoning AI business.

However, the demand for AI Technology will grow whether it is here or somewhere else.

Here is an example of what is happening:

Microsoft plans to expand operations in Canada — especially around cloud, AI, and data infrastructure — based on recent announcements from the company:

Microsoft plans to invest roughly $13–14 billion in Canada by 2027. This is one of the largest commitments the company has ever made in the country.

Microsoft will expand its existing Azure cloud regions in Toronto (Canada Central) and Québec City (Canada East), adding new capacity, servers and services to support AI workloads. New cloud capacity is expected to come online in the second half of 2026 as part of this rollout.