This Thursday’s KEI Network podcast, “AI, Data Centres and Trouble Ahead,” examines the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and the questions it raises about electricity, water, land, community costs and economic benefit. 

One question deserves attention: Who protects the AI infrastructure? Continued below

Continued from above

In The Lost Commons, I describe an emerging independence stack—food, water and compute. A nation unable to assure access to any one of these becomes increasingly dependent upon others. Food and water have long been understood as strategic resources. Compute is rapidly joining them.

Data centres increasingly support banking, communications, health care, government, energy systems, research, artificial intelligence and defence itself. Yet beneath sophisticated cybersecurity are physical buildings dependent upon substations, transmission lines, fibre connections and cooling systems.

Recent conflicts in the Middle East, Russia and Europe have demonstrated that critical infrastructure far removed from a traditional battlefield can still be vulnerable to drones, missiles and sabotage. The response need not be alarm. It should be preparedness—redundancy, geographic dispersion, recovery capability and appropriate physical protection designed into critical computing infrastructure from the beginning.

A Continental Question. The 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy explicitly recognizes Canada as having a “vital role” in defending North America, including strengthening defences against air, missile and undersea threats. It also places renewed emphasis on counter-drone and cyber capabilities. That recognition is increasingly relevant to data centres.

Canada’s vast landmass, Arctic approaches and Atlantic and Pacific coastlines have long provided strategic depth to the continent. But geography alone no longer guarantees security. Modern threats cross borders rapidly, while our electricity grids, communications networks, energy infrastructure and digital systems are already deeply interconnected.

There is an irony here. Canada and the United States are presently allowing a divisive trade war to pull their economies apart even as technology and security make continental cooperation more important. Recent tariffs and retaliatory measures have produced one of the sharpest periods of bilateral economic tension in years. 

Trade differences must be negotiated. But perhaps both countries also need to look beyond them. Defence matters.

The vulnerability of data centres adds another argument for an integrated North American defence architecture—one that protects the sovereignty of both countries while recognizing that the critical infrastructure supporting that sovereignty is increasingly continental.

NORAD demonstrated decades ago that Canada and the United States could defend shared airspace without surrendering national sovereignty. The emerging challenge is broader: airspace, Arctic approaches, energy, communications, cyber systems—and now compute.

Food. Water. Compute. We know why they matter. We are investing billions to build the third.

As Thursday’s panel considers “AI, Data Centres and Trouble Ahead,” an  additional question deserves to be asked: Who defends the independence stack?