The neighborhood is the result of a vast real-estate project launched by the Quebec government in the late 1990s which redeveloped abandoned nineteenth century industrial buildings into a business cluster for information technology companies.

In exchange for handing this over, the SDM gained a minority stake in a joint venture with the real estate arms of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and the FTQ Fonds de Solidarité to fund the construction of the Cité, which occurred in eight phases, with additional phases having been planned.

The Parti Québécois Bouchard Government of Québec then gave payroll tax credits to employers for moving to the new Cité du Multimédia buildings.

After the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the elimination of tax incentives for information technology jobs in the district by the Liberal government of Jean Charest in 2003, phase 9 and others were cancelled, and the structures were sold by the joint venture to the private sector.

Then-finance minister Bernard Landry had been criticized by members of Montreal's real-estate community and some high-tech entrepreneurs when Finance Ministry programs enticed companies to relocate to Cité Multimédia and the Cité du commerce électronique downtown in order to receive tax assistance.