Bell Canada and Cisco plan to work together on sovereign AI infrastructure for Canada, combining Bell’s Canadian data centres and networks with Cisco’s AI, security and infrastructure technologies.
The companies announced a memorandum of understanding on September 29. The MOU outlines plans to collaborate and is not a completed commercial agreement or launched service.
Their goal is to help Canadian organisations deploy, secure and manage AI infrastructure inside Canada, with more control over where critical systems and data are located, secured and managed.
In simple terms, sovereign AI infrastructure means AI systems and data are kept in Canada and remain under Canadian control. Bell and Cisco say the approach could support sensitive workloads and stricter security requirements, particularly for government, regulated industries and other sectors where control and resilience are important.
The companies plan to combine Bell’s Canadian data centre space, power, cooling, physical security, connectivity and operations services with Cisco’s AI infrastructure, security, observability and management technologies.
They will also assess Cisco AI PODs, which provide modular building blocks for different AI workloads, including training and inference. Bell and Cisco will explore flexible consumption models intended to let customers better match costs with how they use or reserve AI infrastructure.
“Bell is focused on helping turn sovereign AI from ambition into infrastructure Canadian organizations can use,” said John Watson, Group President, Business Markets, Bell Cyber, AI Fabric and Ateko.
Raj Juneja, President of Cisco Canada, said Cisco’s portfolio is designed to give customers “more choice in how they build, secure and manage” critical digital environments.
Next, Bell and Cisco will work on solution architectures across three focus areas: building a Canadian sovereign AI platform, supporting modular AI infrastructure deployments and developing flexible commercial models.
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