Canada Pension Plan Investment Board

is “very bullish” on investing domestically, as the government steps up its efforts to attract private capital to projects in the country, a top official at the fund said.

“We’re starting to see strong momentum in galvanization of political will to consider major projects and nation building in a way that we hadn’t seen before,” Manroop Jhooty, the pension plan’s head of total fund management, said Tuesday at the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference in New York. “We’re genuinely excited about the opportunities that presents.”

Pressure has been mounting on Canadian pension plans to invest more domestically to boost the economy, especially amid a “

Buy Canada

” movement fuelled by U.S. President

Donald Trump

’s

trade war

. Most of the so-called

Maple Eight

Canadian pension funds said they’re keen to invest in infrastructure projects in the country, including data centers and natural resources.

CPPIB, which has $731.7 billion of net assets, is also exploring opportunities globally around

artificial intelligence

, particularly pertaining to “power and energy that’s going to be needed to continue to support the AI build-out of data centers themselves,” Jhooty said.

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Bloomberg.com