The Alberta Investment Management Corporation, known as AIMCo, has acquired approximately 1.38 million shares of Strategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR) in a position valued at around $219 million, marking the Edmonton based pension manager’s first ever allocation to a bitcoin linked asset.
AIMCo oversees roughly CAD $194.7 billion in assets on behalf of provincial pension plans, endowments and government accounts in Alberta, including the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, making the disclosure one of the more significant institutional bitcoin proxy moves from a conservative sovereign style fund.
The purchase was surfaced through a regulatory filing tied to institutional ownership of US listed securities and became public on 30 April 2026. AIMCo has not issued a formal press release confirming the position.
Strategy Inc., the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, holds 818,334 bitcoin on its balance sheet, the largest corporate bitcoin treasury in the world. The company has built that position since 2020 through a combination of equity offerings, preferred share issuances and debt, and its stock is widely regarded by institutional investors as a leveraged proxy for bitcoin price performance because the value of the treasury drives the majority of MSTR’s market movement.
The preference for MSTR over direct bitcoin purchases or spot exchange traded funds reflects a recurring pattern among Canadian pension funds. Custody obligations, compliance frameworks, accounting standards and fiduciary requirements make equity stakes considerably easier to manage within regulated fund structures than holding digital assets directly.
AIMCo joins a growing roster of major Canadian financial institutions that have already established MSTR positions. National Bank of Canada holds approximately 1.47 million shares valued at around $273 million, making it the largest Canadian institutional holder of the stock. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board opened its position in Q3 2025, initially disclosing 393,322 shares. The Royal Bank of Canada has been expanding its holding, with reports placing its position in the $230 million range, while the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan holds a smaller stake worth approximately $31 million.
The breadth of Canadian institutional participation points to a collective conclusion that Strategy Inc. shares offer a bitcoin exposure profile that can sit within existing investment mandates without requiring funds to reclassify assets, establish new custodial arrangements or seek regulatory approval for a fundamentally new asset class.
Critics of the trend note that MSTR shares carry materially higher volatility than bitcoin itself, and that the company’s ongoing capital raising activity through equity offerings can dilute bitcoin holdings per share over time as new shares are issued to fund further purchases. During sharp bitcoin corrections, MSTR has historically experienced steeper declines than the underlying asset.
At the time of the disclosure, Strategy Inc. shares were up approximately 0.75 percent in the session but down nearly 10 percent across the prior five trading days.
Whether AIMCo adds to the position in future quarters will depend on bitcoin price performance and how Strategy Inc.’s treasury accumulation strategy evolves under chairman Michael Saylor, who separately confirmed at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas that the company’s STRC preferred stock instrument had grown to $8.5 billion in value in under one year, making it the largest preferred stock instrument in the world by that measure.
