Bell has launched what it calls Bell AI Fabric, a major investment to build Canada’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) compute network.
The project starts with six hydro-powered data centres in British Columbia, aimed at giving Canadian companies and researchers a boost in the global AI race.
The first data centre will open in Kamloops in June 2025, in partnership with AI chipmaker Groq. This will be followed by a second facility in Merritt by the end of the year. Bell plans to bring more centres online in 2026 and 2027, including two 26 MW facilities, one in collaboration with Thompson Rivers University (TRU). Two more AI data centres totaling over 400 MW are also in the works.
With an eventual capacity of 500 MW, Bell AI Fabric will provide high-performance AI infrastructure to support everything from startups to public institutions. These centres will run on clean hydroelectric energy and will power advanced AI tasks like large language models (LLMs) using Groq’s low-cost, high-speed processing chips.
“Bell’s AI Fabric will ensure that Canadian businesses, researchers, and public institutions can access high-performance, sovereign and environmentally responsible AI computing services,” said Bell CEO Mirko Bibic in a statement on Wednesday. “This is transformational for our customers, for Canada, and for Bell.”
Bell is also working with TRU to provide students and researchers access to AI training and inference tools. The new data centre on campus will use its waste heat to help warm university buildings, making the project both high-tech and eco-friendly.
According to California-based Groq, it says it “builds fast,” noting data centres go live in weeks.
With this investment, Bell is positioning itself as a full-service AI provider, offering everything from hardware infrastructure to AI strategy and app development for Canadian enterprises and governments. But it’s not just Bell that’s getting into the AI data centre game. Back in March, Telus partnered with Nvidia to build the country’s first Sovereign AI Factory in Quebec.
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500 mega Watts of electricity, assuming Canadian household average electricity use of 11–12 MWh/year, could supply roughly 380,000 households. That is a city like Ottawa or Quebec City. These are crazy numbers for planned AI data centres.