Canadian telecom companies, Bell Canada (NYSE: BCE) and TELUS (NYSE: TU), announced significant investments in large data centers, referring to them as “AI factories,” primarily in the western province of British Columbia (B.C.). The companies say these investments are intended to bolster Canada’s AI compute capacity and support data sovereignty. These initiatives reflect a broader push within Canada to enhance domestic AI infrastructure amid global competition and concerns about reliance on foreign technology.
Bell’s Bell AI Fabric will launch six B.C.-based data centers, starting with a 7-megawatt (MW) facility in Kamloops in June 2025, creating what the company claims will be Canada’s largest AI-compute “supercluster.” These data centers will utilize language processing units or LPUs from U.S.-based AI inference provider Groq (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s Grok AI).
Without citing exact figures, Bell said it plans to invest “hundreds of millions to billions of dollars” in the Bell AI Fabric project. The company indicated the scale is significant, reflecting the high costs of constructing and equipping data centers with a combined capacity of approximately 500 MW.
TELUS’s Sovereign AI Factory, backed by a $51 billion investment, will deploy NVIDIA-powered facilities in Rimouski, Québec (summer 2025), followed by a second site in Kamloops, B.C., emphasizing sustainability and data security, Inside Towers reported. The companies say these projects leverage telecom infrastructure and align with Canada’s AI strategy, recognizing they face challenges from power constraints and global competition.
Canadian government officials, Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, emphasized these forward-looking private sector investments will help create high-quality jobs in Canada, open up new opportunities for workers at home and strengthen Canada’s position as an AI leader. Moreover, they say these initiatives are aligned with Canada’s plans to build the strongest economy in the G7.
By John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor
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