Business Brief this week: A stampede, a gold rush, and an AI arms race

Globe and Mail

13 hours ago

Good morning. This week's AI for Good Summit in Geneva is showing how the technology's innovations are also pushing global alliances into unfamiliar territory. That's in focus today – along with this year's Calgary Stampede and a gold rush that's obscuring an inconvenient truth about Canada's exports.
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Tomorrow: Ahead of the July 9 deadline set by Trump for countries to strike trade deals with the U.S., the president said the White House would begin sending letters over the weekend to countries in batches of 10 to notify them of the tariff rates they can expect.
This week: The Calgary Stampede, which opened on Friday and runs through July 13, is known for many things: rodeo, pancakes and denim as far as the eye can see. But its real currency is connection. For 10 days, every bar and rooftop patio in the city is turned into a pop-up boardroom.
This year's edition lands at an uneasy moment. Alberta's energy sector has big wins to toast – LNG exports have begun from the West Coast, the long-delayed Trans Mountain pipeline is pumping and Ottawa is suddenly talking about Canada as an 'energy superpower.' The city's mood is buoyant. But a cautious kind of buoyancy, if there can be such a thing: Political uncertainty still looms large, from Mark Carney's early tenure in Ottawa to the underwhelming response to Alberta's proposed new pipeline.
On the books: Earnings and economic events are light, but Canada's recent trade report is a reminder of how hard domestic exporters are being hit as Carney presses for a tariff-free deal with the U.S.
The UN's AI for Good summit this week is revealing how countries are racing to build sovereign computing infrastructure that is reliant on foreign investment.
In an attempt to capitalize on the economic promise of artificial intelligence, Western governments are investing in domestic data centres, drafting AI rules, and striking deals with countries that, less than a decade ago, might have faced sharper scrutiny.
By turning to investors such as Saudi Arabia, critics warn that attempts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants risk entrenching new forms of dependence on states with close ties to China and deeply contested human rights records.
Both Canada and the U.S. have set aside recent ruptures over human rights in favour of strategic and economic interests.
Canada's 2018 standoff – sparked by then–foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland's criticism of Saudi Arabia's arrest of women's rights activists – formally ended in 2023 when the two governments restored ties on the basis of 'mutual respect and common interests.'
For the U.S., Russia's invasion of Ukraine heightened the need for oil market stability and stronger regional alliances, prompting Washington to re-engage with Riyadh despite earlier condemnations of the kingdom's role in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (During his first presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia 'pay the price' and called the country a 'pariah' with 'very little social redeeming value.')
Human-rights advocates have remained critical of the UN for inviting Saudi officials to the AI summit – and concern remains over Riyadh's expanding ties with China, which include co-operation on data centres, chip development and surveillance technologies that could complicate Western efforts to build secure, independent AI systems.
In May, President Donald Trump signed a US$600-billion strategic agreement with Saudi Arabia, including more than US$40-billion earmarked for artificial intelligence and related infrastructure.
Canada, too, is open to discussions with Saudi Arabia to support domestic data-centre expansion. In a recent interview with The Globe's Joe Castaldo and Pippa Norman, federal AI minister Evan Solomon said Ottawa is in search of 'pockets of capital' to help build sovereign capacity, while insisting any agreements would be pursued with 'eyes wide open' and preserve Canadian oversight.
'Diplomatic ties and investment does not mean you agree with governments,' he said. 'We can't look at AI as a walled-off garden. Like, 'Oh, we cannot ever take money from X or Y.''
Ottawa's openness was underscored last week when Castaldo reported that U.S. data-centre firm CoreWeave Inc. will soon operate a site in Cambridge, Ont., with Canadian AI startup Cohere Inc. – backed by $240-million from a federal fund – as a customer.
British-Canadian AI guru Geoffrey Hinton, who is presenting tomorrow, told The Globe he planned on telling Solomon that Canada needs to regulate AI when the two met last week. But he acknowledged a trade-off.
'The big problem is that unless you can get international agreements, countries that don't regulate will have an advantage over countries that do. That's the same for exploiting natural resources.'
It's just one issue for Canada to tackle as it navigates the contradictions of a sovereignty strategy built on foreign capital, no clear regulatory framework and a bit of moral flexibility.
Canada's trade deficit with the world narrowed in May from a record high the previous month.
But tariffs continued to weigh on exports to the United States – and the rise in prices for gold skewed the picture.
Canada's trade deficit with the world – in very technical terms according to The Globe's Jason Kirby, 'a measure of how much more stuff we buy from other countries than sell to them' – fell to $5.9-billion in May from a record high of $7.6-billion in April.
But after stripping out imports and exports of the gold category, Kirby observes, Canada's trade deficit widened to $10.3-billion.
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Stock markets were mixed amid confusion as U.S. officials flagged a delay on tariffs but failed to provide specifics on the changes. Wall Street futures were in negative territory while TSX futures pointed higher.
Overseas, the pan-European STOXX 600 was up 0.34 per cent in morning trading. Britain's FTSE 100 edged higher 0.13 per cent, Germany's DAX gained 0.77 per cent and France's CAC 40 rose 0.25 per cent.
In Asia, Japan's Nikkei closed 0.56 per cent lower, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng slipped 0.12 per cent.
The Canadian dollar traded at 73.19 U.S. cents.