Bell has told Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation it won’t hand over technical documents about its AI data centre near Regina, and the First Nation has now given the company until November 16 to change its answer.
That’s according to CTV News, which reported that Dan Rink, president of AI infrastructure and strategy for Bell AI Fabric, replied on October 16 to a letter Chief Rodger Redman sent BCE CEO Mirko Bibic on October 2. CTV News is owned by Bell Media, a BCE subsidiary.
Redman’s letter asked for a wide range of records, including correspondence with regulators and technical documents on the centre’s cooling system, the lifecycle of its computing equipment and any planned expansions, including power generation. He said the project in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood is big enough that the nation needs a “clear understanding of its technical basis, environmental implications and approval processes.”
Rink’s reply covered publicly available information on cooling, water and power use, equipment recycling and the eventual decommissioning of the site, and he offered to meet with the chief and band council. He stopped short of sharing the documents themselves, describing many of them as technical reports, commercial agreements and regulatory correspondence. “Bell does not release these outside the regulatory processes they were prepared for or the agreements that govern them,” he wrote.
Standing Buffalo now wants Bell to confirm by 5 p.m. on November 16 whether it will share the information and take part in the nation’s own review of the project. The nation also said any meeting with Bell would count only as information sharing, and would not replace Crown consultation or signal its consent.
When we last covered the dispute on October 19, Standing Buffalo said the campus sits on unceded traditional Dakota territory and was still waiting on Bell’s response, with Redman saying the nation was prepared to go to court. It had warned of “substantial and far-reaching legal proceedings” if Bell didn’t reply. Bell has now replied, just not with what the nation asked for.
The site was first planned as a 300-megawatt campus, with its first data hall expected in the first half of 2027. Bell now wants to turn it into a 1.2-gigawatt AI hub covering more than 1,000 acres, and it plans to buy about 895 acres of farmland for an expansion estimated at $52 billion. CTV News says the project now ranks among the largest investments in Canadian history.
Should Bell share more with First Nations before its Saskatchewan expansion moves ahead?
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