For more than a decade, SR&ED gave Canadian companies no tax reason to own the hardware their R&D ran on. Capital expenditures came out of the program after 2013, and the logic that followed was simple: if the machine could not be claimed, renting capacity was one less thing to think about.
That has changed. Bill C-15 received royal assent on March 26, 2026, restoring capital expenditure eligibility along with the shared-use-equipment rules. It applies to property acquired on or after December 16, 2024, and to lease costs for R&D assets first payable on that date or later. It is not forward-looking only.
For companies that have spent two years buying AI compute, the timing is worth a look.
The window lines up with a buying cycle
That date falls almost exactly where Canadian companies started acquiring inference and training hardware in earnest. Those purchases were made when nobody had reason to flag them as claimable, because they were not.
They may now warrant review. Eligibility still depends on how the property is used, under rules still being reflected in updated CRA guidance. But the assumption most finance teams have carried since 2014 is out of date, and assumptions like that persist quietly.
Owned and rented compute differ
Cloud GPU capacity is an operating expense. It does not become capital because the underlying resource is a machine. The restoration changes one side of that comparison and not the other.
Companies that chose cloud infrastructure under the old rules made a reasonable call on the information available. That information has been superseded. Whether the change is material enough to revisit depends on the size of the spend, the life of the hardware, how much of its use is genuinely R&D, and plenty of considerations outside tax. Worth discussing with your advisors rather than assuming the old comparison holds.
Mixed-use hardware is the case to plan for
A cluster used for model development early in the week and production inference later does not sort neatly into an R&D bucket. Previous versions of these rules distinguished property used substantially all for SR&ED from equipment shared with commercial activity, treating each differently.
Whatever the thresholds land at, the practical implication applies now: record usage as it happens. Scheduling logs, job queues and cluster allocation records already capture most of it. Preserving that and tying it to specific projects is far easier than reconstructing it at filing.
Companies buying hardware today have an advantage over those reviewing past purchases. The record can start the day the equipment is racked.
What we would suggest
If you have acquired computing hardware since late 2024, or plan to: identify what was purchased and when, establish how it is actually used in a form you can evidence, and revisit any infrastructure decision made on the assumption that owned hardware carried no SR&ED benefit.
Leyton’s consultants work with Canadian companies to assess expenditures against current SR&ED rules. Contact our team for a review of your recent capital investments.