On the margins of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in November 2025 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the prime ministers of Canada, Australia, and India announced the launch of the Australia–Canada–India Technology and Innovation Partnership (ACITI). The joint statement outlined a shared commitment to deepen trilateral co-operation on critical and emerging technologies, with a particular emphasis on green energy innovation, resilient supply chains, and the development and mass adoption of AI.
In this context, ACITI can be understood as part of a wider Indo-Pacific realignment, as countries seek to play a more active role in shaping technology ecosystems and reducing strategic vulnerabilities linked to concentrated supply chains, particularly in critical minerals and clean energy technologies. The partnership brings together three democratic partners with complementary capabilities: Canada’s strengths in AI research and clean technology, India’s scale and digital infrastructure, and Australia’s resource base and commercialization capacity. This complementarity reflects a shared recognition that deeper collaboration will be crucial to building resilient and trusted technology systems and supply chains.
Key Takeaways
1. Move ACITI Beyond Initial Announcement: ACITI should evolve beyond high-level strategic alignment toward a more implementation-oriented platform focused on economic resilience, emerging technologies, clean energy systems, and secure supply chains.
2. Build on Existing Bilateral Foundations: Canada, Australia, and India already have expanding bilateral co-operation across supply chain resilience including critical minerals, clean energy, AI governance, digital infrastructure, and advanced technologies. ACITI provides an opportunity to align and scale these existing initiatives through a trilateral framework and complement each other’s strengths and potential.
3. Address the Real Bottlenecks: Across emerging technology and clean energy sectors, the principal constraints increasingly relate to refining and processing capacity, infrastructure integration, commercialization pathways and regulatory co-ordination rather than resource availability alone.
4. Prioritize High-Impact Sectors: Some of the strongest opportunities for trilateral co-operation lie in AI governance and trusted digital infrastructure, semiconductor and supply chains (especially pertaining to critical minerals), battery storage and grid integration, green hydrogen, carbon capture technologies and industrial decarbonization.
5. Focus on Co-ordinated Implementation: ACITI’s long-term success will depend on sustained political and industry engagement, biannual implementation-focused dialogues, and co-ordinated working groups capable of translating fragmented bilateral initiatives into scalable trilateral outcomes.
From Bilateral Engagement to Trilateral Co-operation
ACITI builds on bilateral relationships that have already been converging around shared priorities, particularly in advanced technologies, clean energy, critical minerals, and economic resilience. Together, these relationships provide the foundation for broader trilateral co-operation across strategic sectors.
Canada–India Relations
For ACITI, the renewed momentum in Canada–India relations strengthens the foundation for co-operation in advanced technologies including clean energy and critical minerals. Since mid-2025, bilateral engagement has strengthened through high-level meetings at the G7 and G20, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s March 2026 visit to India, and progress toward a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA). Co-operation is also shifting toward energy transition and supply chain resilience, including through the Strategic Energy Partnership, uranium supply agreements, critical minerals co-operation, and growing academic, research, and innovation linkages.
Canada–Australia Relations
Canada–Australia relations have also expanded in recent years, moving toward greater co-ordination in industrial strategy and supply chain development. Carney’s March 2026 visit to Australia marked a turning point, which resulted in agreements spanning critical minerals, clean energy, and emerging technologies, alongside increased collaboration on investment and innovation. For ACITI, this relationship highlights the importance of aligning resource development, processing capacity, and technology co-operation across trusted partners.
Australia–India Relations
The Australia–India relationship demonstrates how institutionalized co-operation can support long-term co-ordination across strategic sectors relevant to ACITI. The India–Australia Economic Co-operation and Trade Agreement (ECTA), in force since December 2022, has strengthened economic ties by improving market access and expanding trade and services flows. This has been complemented by alignment under the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and continued engagement through platforms such as the G20 and the Quad, reinforcing co-operation on economic resilience and regional stability.
Trilateral Opportunities
These bilateral relationships provide a strong foundation for trilateral co-operation. Australia–India relations demonstrate a model of institutionalized and sector-driven engagement, while Canada–India relations reflect renewed alignment across strategic sectors, and Canada–Australia relations highlight growing co-ordination in industrial strategy, supply chain diversification and technology governance. Building on these complementarities, ACITI provides an opportunity to move beyond parallel bilateral initiatives toward more integrated collaboration.
Strategic Alignment in Emerging Technologies
AI and Digital Governance
For ACITI, AI governance represents both a strategic challenge and an important area for trilateral co-operation. Canada, Australia, and India are all seeking to expand AI adoption while ensuring that governance frameworks can manage growing risks related to safety, accountability, and public trust. At present, none of the three countries has comprehensive, binding AI legislation in place. Instead, they rely on a mix of voluntary frameworks, evolving policy approaches, and principles-based governance mechanisms.
While each country has advanced distinct domestic approaches to AI governance, there is also growing convergence around shared principles and standards. Canada has emphasized responsible AI through initiatives such as its Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence Systems standard, Australia has advanced governance through its Voluntary AI Safety Standard and AI Ethics Framework, and India is continuing to develop its own AI governance guidelines.
This reliance on soft-law mechanisms reflects a deliberate effort to avoid overregulation in a rapidly evolving technological environment. However, it also creates fragmentation in how AI systems are assessed, deployed, and monitored across jurisdictions, complicating cross-border deployment, and slowing interoperability. The non-binding declaration adopted at the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026 nevertheless signalled growing alignment around secure, trustworthy, inclusive, and responsible AI development, alongside greater international co-operation.
The announcement by Carney on June 4, 2026, launching AI for All — Canada's national AI strategy targeting 60 per cent AI adoption across Canadian organizations by 2034, up from just over 12 per cent currently — signals the ambition underpinning this agenda. Australia's own National AI Plan sets out a parallel three-pillar agenda spanning opportunity, adoption, and safety, including an explicit commitment to partner on global norms. This convergence is already translating into concrete bilateral commitments: Canada and Australia have signed an MOU between their AI safety institutes to deepen information exchange, advance model evaluation, and facilitate talent exchanges. With India, both countries have agreed to collaborate on AI-assisted diagnostic tools for remote health care, cross-border work-integrated learning at Canadian AI institutes, and AI algorithms for energy grid management.
The establishment of AI safety institutes in all three countries — Canada in 2024, and India and Australia in 2025 — creates a shared institutional foundation for deeper co-operation. Through ACITI, which explicitly commits to examining the mass adoption of AI to improve citizens' lives, these bilateral threads can be woven into a coherent trilateral effort. A trilateral approach would add value where bilateral arrangements may fall short: by enabling joint safety testing and benchmarking among the three countries’ AI safety institutes, co-ordinating a shared standards posture in international fora such as the OECD, Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, or future AI summits, and creating a common governance reference point for bilateral projects in areas such as health care, skills development, and energy systems.
Significant challenges remain in AI governance, some of which could be addressed through ACITI’s co-ordination role. Regulatory gaps persist in areas such as advanced model oversight, cross-border data flows, and liability frameworks. Balancing innovation with safeguards related to privacy, data governance, and national security will require careful calibration, particularly given differing domestic priorities and institutional capacities. While full regulatory harmonization may be neither feasible nor desirable, targeted alignment through ACITI on standards, safety practices, and governance principles offers a pragmatic pathway to strengthen trust, improve interoperability, and support responsible AI adoption across all three countries.
Digital Infrastructure, Data Governance, and Connectivity
The development of secure and trusted digital ecosystems is emerging as a central pillar of AI co-operation across Canada, Australia, and India. There is a growing recognition that trusted digital ecosystems must be built on secure data architectures, reliable connectivity, and governance frameworks that reinforce transparency, accountability, and resilience against cyber and systemic risk. (For reference: Canada’s National Cyber Security Strategy; Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy 2023–2030; and India’s Digital India initiative.)
In this context, collaboration on data governance and digital public infrastructure presents a particularly high-impact opportunity. India’s experience with population-scale digital systems such as Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface and the Open Network for Digital Commerce demonstrates how interoperable digital platforms can support both state capacity and private-sector innovation. Canada and Australia bring complementary strengths in privacy governance, trusted data stewardship, and secure digital infrastructure, which could support alignment on data sharing, cross-border flows, and privacy protection.
Enhancing digital inclusion and access remains a critical cross-cutting priority. Despite advanced capabilities, gaps persist across all three countries in access to high-speed connectivity, digital literacy, and equitable participation in AI-driven economies. For India, this challenge is one of scale and regional disparity; for Canada and Australia, it is often defined by rural, remote, and Indigenous connectivity gaps. Addressing these disparities will be essential to ensuring that AI adoption is both inclusive and economically broad-based. Co-ordinated efforts, ranging from infrastructure investment and public-private partnerships to skills development and digital literacy initiatives, can help expand access while reinforcing the legitimacy and societal acceptance of AI systems.
For ACITI, advancing trusted and inclusive digital ecosystems could become an important enabler of broader objectives related to AI governance, innovation, and cross-border interoperability.
Green Energy Technologies and Resilient Supply Chains under ACITI
The ACITI partnership’s emphasis on green energy innovation and supply chain resilience reflects a broader economic and strategic imperative. Technologies expected to shape the next decade of global competition — including AI data centres, semiconductor manufacturing, electric vehicles, and clean energy systems — are highly energy-intensive and require large-scale, reliable, and increasingly low-carbon sources of energy. For Canada, Australia, and India — each investing in AI capacity, critical minerals, and clean energy transitions — energy security and industrial competitiveness are becoming increasingly interconnected. These pressures strengthen the rationale for co-operation across energy systems, critical technologies, and resilient supply chains.
Battery Storage and Grid Integration
Two key areas for trilateral collaboration are grid modernization and renewable integration. Across all three countries, a common structural challenge lies in the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, which cannot independently provide continuous and reliable power. Addressing this challenge requires a combination of grid-scale storage, smart grid management, expanded transmission infrastructure, and demand-side flexibility to better align energy supply with consumption.
Australia’s contribution lies in its leadership in grid-scale battery storage and virtual power plant (VPP) systems. The Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, one of the first large-scale lithium-ion grid batteries, demonstrates how storage can stabilize electricity systems and respond to grid disturbances in milliseconds, reducing reliance on conventional backup generation. Since then, Australia has scaled deployment significantly, supported by regulatory integration through the Australian Energy Market Operator. This operational experience offers valuable lessons for India and Canada as they navigate similar integration challenges.
In India, where coal still accounts for nearly 70 per cent of electricity generation despite rapid renewable expansion, the key challenge lies in converting installed renewable capacity such as in wind and solar into reliable, dispatchable power. While storage deployment is accelerating — with over 90 GWh of projects underway — constraints remain in areas such as financing, grid integration, and market design.
Canada, as it expands wind and solar capacity, will face similar integration challenges. At the same time, it brings complementary strengths through its hydro-based electricity system, which provides flexible, on-demand clean power to balance variable renewables. With hydropower already contributing around nine per cent to India’s energy mix and significant untapped potential remaining, Canada’s experience offers a practical pathway to strengthen flexible, low-carbon power systems.
Building on existing bilateral efforts, ACITI provides an opportunity to formalize trilateral collaboration in this area.
Green Hydrogen and Value Chains
In addition to grid modernization and storage, green hydrogen presents a significant opportunity for trilateral collaboration, particularly in decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, fertilizers, and refining. It also offers a pathway to align production, technology development, and long-term demand across the three countries.
India is rapidly scaling its green hydrogen sector, targeting 5 million metric tons annually by 2030, supported by policy measures designed to stimulate both supply and demand. However, further expansion will depend on reducing production costs, scaling electrolyzer manufacturing, and developing supporting infrastructure and export pathways. Australia’s abundant and low-cost renewable resources position it as a potential large-scale producer of green hydrogen, while Canada brings complementary strengths in electrolyzer technologies and clean energy systems. Aligning these capabilities can support commercially viable hydrogen value chains, building on existing bilateral initiatives such as the India–Australia Green Hydrogen Taskforce and Canada–India research partnerships.
A critical challenge for scaling commercially viable hydrogen value chains lies in creating stable and long-term demand for green hydrogen. This is particularly evident in sectors such as fertilizers, where hydrogen is a core input in ammonia production and is currently derived largely from natural gas, linking fertilizer production directly to volatile global gas markets. As a result, fertilizer production and, by extension, food systems, remain highly exposed to price shocks. In this context, green hydrogen produced from renewable energy sources offers not only a decarbonization pathway but also a means to enhance energy and input security. Creating stable demand for green hydrogen in sectors such as fertilizers and refining would therefore be crucial to making it both commercially viable and strategically useful for ACITI partners.
Carbon capture, utilization, and storage
Alongside green hydrogen, carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) present another important area for trilateral co-operation, particularly in sectors where fossil fuels are likely to remain part of the energy transition.
The three countries bring complementary capabilities to this area. Canada contributes operational experience, technical expertise, and established regulatory frameworks for CCUS deployment. Australia offers significant geological storage potential and is advancing commercial-scale CCUS projects and storage infrastructure. India, meanwhile, is expanding policy support, pilot projects, and a proposed CCUS incentive scheme worth close to C$2.8 billion to scale decarbonization across coal-based power generation and hard-to-abate industrial sectors. Together, these create opportunities for co-operation in technology deployment, storage infrastructure, and regulatory co-ordination while supporting emissions reduction and energy security.
Existing bilateral initiatives already provide a foundation for deeper collaboration. One example is the MOU between Saskatchewan’s Petroleum Technology Research Centre and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s National Centre of Excellence in CCUS, which supports joint research and pilot projects. ACITI could help scale such initiatives through broader trilateral co-ordination and knowledge-sharing mechanisms.
Reliable clean energy systems form the foundation of these transitions but scaling them will also depend on secure access to the critical minerals that underpin semiconductors, batteries, and clean technologies.
Strategic Minerals and Resilient Technology Supply Chains
Semiconductors, clean energy technologies, and advanced manufacturing systems depend on more than 40 critical minerals. These materials underpin AI systems, defence technologies, batteries, electric vehicles, and digital infrastructure, making secure supply chains increasingly important for economic competitiveness and technological resilience. China currently dominates the supply or processing of many critical minerals, including gallium, germanium, rare earth elements, indium, and lithium.
For ACITI, this highlights the importance of prioritizing a limited set of strategic minerals and focusing co-operation on refining capacity, technology collaboration, co-ordinated investment, and long-term demand commitments across the value chain. The following examples highlight where trilateral co-operation could strengthen resilience, processing capacity, and industrial co-ordination.
- Gallium: China produces around 750 tonnes annually, accounting for nearly all global supply, while Australia is scaling toward approximately 100 tonnes, Canada remains at the pilot stage with an estimated 40 tonnes of potential output, and India is targeting nearly 10 tonnes despite having no active production. Gallium is typically extracted as a byproduct of aluminum production, giving Australia a clear upstream advantage as a major bauxite producer. In this context, Australia can support raw material supply, Canada can expand refining and processing capacity, and India can strengthen downstream manufacturing, particularly in gallium nitride (GaN)-based semiconductor and display technologies. Prioritizing joint processing capacity and long-term offtake agreements could help anchor investment and expand supply beyond China.
- Germanium: China dominates global germanium supply, particularly in processing and exports, while Canada is an established refiner with emerging upstream potential, and Australia remains at an early stage with limited domestic output. India is largely import-dependent despite growing demand in fibre optics, semiconductors, and defence. As germanium is typically recovered as a by-product of zinc and coal processing, scaling supply depends on both upstream access and recovery technologies. Here, aligning Australia’s resource potential, Canada’s refining expertise, and India’s growing industrial demand can support targeted investment in recovery and processing capacity.
- Indium: Indium is an important input for semiconductors and display technologies. China leads global indium production, accounting for roughly 70 per cent of supply, while Canada is a notable producer, contributing about six per cent of global output through recovery from zinc smelting. Australia remains at an early stage, with growing exploration potential, and India is primarily a downstream player with expanding manufacturing and recycling capacity. As with other by-product minerals, strengthening recovery and refining is key. Co-ordinated efforts across extraction, refining, and recycling could help diversify supply and strengthen semiconductor supply chain resilience.
- Lithium: Lithium highlights how refining and processing, rather than resource availability alone, have become the primary bottlenecks in building resilient battery supply chains. Australia holds the world’s second-largest reserves after Chile and is the world’s largest producer, while Canada ranks sixth in reserves and seventh in production and is expanding both upstream production and refining capacity. India, meanwhile, is developing domestic resources and scaling manufacturing demand, including recent discoveries in Jammu & Kashmir and efforts to secure overseas supply. However, refining remains highly concentrated, with China controlling a dominant share of global capacity. Addressing this imbalance will require greater midstream investment. Co-ordinated efforts to expand refining capacity, alongside long-term offtake agreements linking Australian and Canadian supply with Indian manufacturing demand, could help build a more resilient lithium value chain.
- Rare Earth Elements: China’s dominance in rare earth elements is particularly pronounced in processing and magnet production, even where resource bases are geographically diversified. While Australia is a leading producer with substantial reserves, Canada and India also hold significant resource bases but continue to face constraints in scaling commercial production and refining capacity. The primary challenge is therefore not resource availability, but the development of downstream processing capabilities and industrial ecosystems. Recent initiatives, including Saskatchewan’s emerging rare earth processing facility, Canada–India collaboration on processing technologies, and Canada–Australia co-operation on mineral mapping and workforce development, signal progress but remain at an early stage.
Taken together, these examples highlight that the core constraint across critical minerals is increasingly not extraction, but processing, refining, and industrial scale. Aligning Australia’s resource base, Canada’s processing and technological expertise, and India’s growing industrial and manufacturing demand could help shift supply chains away from concentrated models and toward more diversified and resilient systems.
Commercial Pathways and Sectoral Opportunities
Innovation and R&D Collaboration
The bilateral agreements concluded during Carney’s March 2026 visits to India and Australia provide a foundation for expanding trilateral co-operation across research, industry, and talent development. Existing Canada–India partnerships in AI and critical minerals, alongside Canada–Australia collaboration through AI safety institutes and research hubs, demonstrate how bilateral initiatives can evolve into a broader trilateral innovation framework. These efforts reflect complementary strengths, including Canada’s research and processing capabilities, Australia’s expertise in minerals and energy systems, and India’s scale in engineering, manufacturing, and technology deployment. The next step is to strengthen these linkages through shared research platforms, joint pilot projects, and targeted talent mobility programs.
Financing and Commercialization
Sustaining co-operation under ACITI will require co-ordinated funding to support joint research, pilot projects, talent exchanges, and institutional mechanisms for collaboration across critical minerals, semiconductors, and clean energy systems. By providing a platform for policy co-ordination, standards alignment, and industry engagement, ACITI can also help create conditions that encourage greater participation from private firms, institutional investors, and other stakeholders in large-scale industrial and infrastructure projects.
ACITI could help ensure that research and innovation do not remain confined to the academic or pilot stage, but can scale into commercially viable technologies, industries, and cross-border industrial partnerships. A trilateral ACITI Innovation Working Group could support firms across the ecosystem, from startups and SMEs to larger industrial players, by improving access to financing, industrial partnerships, and cross-border markets.
Third-Market Collaboration
ACITI’s strategic value could extend beyond internal co-ordination to joint engagement in third markets, particularly in East Asia. Partners such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan host advanced semiconductor manufacturing ecosystems and represent important downstream markets for critical mineral inputs. While Canada, Australia, and India currently engage these markets primarily through separate bilateral channels, greater co-ordination through shared market intelligence, aligned supply specifications, and joint industry dialogues could improve scale, credibility, and bargaining power.
Pathways for Trilateral Co-operation
Priority Areas for Action
A practical starting point for ACITI is a joint mapping of existing bilateral initiatives to identify overlaps, gaps, and opportunities for trilateral scaling. The next phase should focus on translating alignment into co-ordinated implementation across a limited number of high-impact areas.
- AI Safety, Standards, and Compute Access: Develop a shared baseline for AI safety and governance by aligning existing national frameworks and reducing compliance barriers for firms operating across all three markets. Co-operation on compute access, testing frameworks, and AI safety standards could further strengthen interoperability.
- Semiconductors and Critical Minerals Supply Chains: Prioritize a limited set of strategic minerals, such as gallium, germanium, lithium, and rare earth elements, while aligning upstream supply, refining capacity, and downstream manufacturing demand.
- Clean Energy Innovation and Industrial Decarbonization: Develop trilateral co-operation focused on battery storage, grid integration, green hydrogen, CCUS, and critical minerals processing supported by joint pilot projects, shared certification frameworks, and co-ordinated industrial decarbonization efforts.
- Digital Infrastructure and Cross-Border Data Flows: Launch sector-focused dialogues on cross-border data governance in priority areas such as AI research, health, and finance. A mutual recognition approach could enable early progress while building trust for broader alignment.
Mechanisms for Collaboration
To support implementation, ACITI could prioritize a limited set of outcome-oriented collaboration mechanisms.
- Biannual Dialogues: Regular implementation-focused meetings tied to specific deliverables, including project pipelines, standards proposals, financing mechanisms, and regulatory co-ordination, could help maintain momentum and support continuity across priority areas.
- Joint R&D Initiatives and Research Chairs: Building on existing university partnerships, ACITI could co-fund targeted research positions and pilot projects in areas of clear complementarity, including battery materials, semiconductor inputs, clean energy systems, and AI safety tools.
- Innovation and Commercialization Working Group: A trilateral ACITI Innovation Working Group could support firms across the ecosystem, from startups and SMEs to larger industrial players, by supporting access to financing, industrial partnerships, and cross-border markets.
- Standards and Regulatory Co-ordination: Sector-specific regulatory dialogues could initially focus on commercially significant areas such as green hydrogen certification for export markets, critical minerals traceability, AI governance, and cross-border data interoperability. Incremental approaches, including mutual recognition mechanisms, could support gradual alignment.
Conclusion
ACITI emerges at a time when global technology, energy, and supply chains are being reshaped by geopolitical competition, the energy transition, and the rapid expansion of AI. In this context, deeper co-ordination among Canada, Australia, and India offers a pragmatic pathway to reduce strategic vulnerabilities and strengthen system resilience. The partnership can draw on complementary strengths to support more integrated value chains across critical minerals, clean energy, and emerging technologies.
This opportunity is reinforced by a growing network of bilateral agreements across the three countries, spanning trade, critical minerals, clean energy, and technology co-operation. While these initiatives provide a strong foundation, they remain fragmented. The next phase will require shifting from identifying areas of co-operation to aligning existing efforts and translating them into co-ordinated trilateral outcomes. This will involve prioritizing a limited set of projects, strengthening linkages between policy and industry, and aligning financing, standards, and regulatory frameworks with the practical requirements of implementation.
Ultimately, ACITI’s success will depend on its ability to move from intent to delivery — mobilizing capital at scale, securing long-term commercial commitments, and sustaining political support across all three countries.
• Edited by: Vina Nadjibulla, Vice-President, Research & Strategy, and Ted Fraser, Senior Editor, APF Canada
