Bell has announced plans to build a 300 megawatt AI data centre in Sherwood, Saskatchewan. The project carries a huge $1.7 billion price tag for the physical buildings, while tenants Cerebras and CoreWeave will provide the specialized computing hardware.
Construction on the first phase is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2026, with the facility expected to start operating in early 2027. Once the site is fully operational, it will include four data halls. Bell says the centre will focus on sovereign AI compute to serve government agencies and private businesses.
The project is expected to create at least 800 construction jobs and 80 full-time positions once the doors open. Bell has committed to prioritizing Saskatchewan-based and Indigenous suppliers during the build. Agreements are already in place with the George Gordon First Nation for workforce development and a heat reuse project.
Bell says the economic impact is “up to $12 billion” for the province.
Here’s what the proposed site will look like:
To manage environmental impacts, the facility will use a closed-loop cooling system that requires no municipal water. It will draw power from a dedicated SaskPower industrial feed separate from residential lines. The 160-acre site is located away from residential areas and will include tree buffers and downward-facing lights to reduce noise and light pollution.
Cerebras will provide high-performance wafer-scale technology for AI training and inference, while CoreWeave will offer scalable computing powered by NVIDIA GPUs.
According to Bell’s breakdown of the project to investors, it will spend roughly $1.7 billion to build the Saskatchewan facility, with $1.3 billion of that cost occurring in 2026 and $400 million offset by customer prepayments and setup fees.
Bell is also partnering with SaskTel to link the centre to a national fibre network, and with the University of Regina and Saskatchewan Polytechnic to study how waste heat from the facility could be used to warm nearby campuses.
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