TORONTO — Bell is getting into the AI data centre business with six new facilities in British Columbia, as it seeks to capitalize on growing business demand and government support for computing capacity in Canada.

The telecommunications giant will lease space in the buildings to cloud service providers, government departments and businesses to run their AI hardware. Bell itself will operate the data centres, providing power, cooling, fibre connections and cybersecurity. Its Ateko consulting arm will help clients deploy their technology.

Predictions that AI use will keep growing have sent companies scrambling to build infrastructure for the technology, including facilities equipped with cutting-edge chips. Several multinational and Canadian firms have announced plans for massive new data centre complexes in the country. 

Bell CEO Mirko Bibic said the company has already secured the 500 megawatts of power in B.C. it needs for the six new data centres, which it will build over several years. “We’re actually announcing things that are real—this is the significant differentiator,” he told The Logic.

The global market for computing capacity to train and run AI models and applications is already worth tens of billions of dollars, and is growing rapidly, Bibic said. Canadian businesses have historically been slower to adopt new technologies than those in peer economies, but the executive said he’s not worried about demand for the new data centres. “We can debate the pace of growth, but there will be growth,” he said. 

Groq, a San Francisco-based startup, will be the anchor tenant of Bell’s first B.C. data centre, a seven-megawatt facility in Kamloops that’s set to open next month. The startup sells cloud capacity powered by its own chips to businesses, which are specifically designed to run large language models and AI applications. 

Bell is also building a 26-megawatt data centre in Kamloops for Thompson Rivers University, scheduled to come online in 2026 and plug into the BCNET network used by academic researchers in the province. The bulk of the telecom firm’s new capacity, over 400 megawatts, will come from two facilities that the firm said are in advanced planning. 

The company is also targeting the largest cloud providers as clients. “They’re going to need to provide sovereign solutions to their Canadian customers,” Bibic said. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are all expanding their data centre capacity in Canada, although none currently have their own facilities in B.C. 

Bell is seeking public funding for its AI data centre expansion, but Bibic said it’ll build the new facilities regardless of whether it receives the money. “This current federal government is going to lean into AI as one of the key priorities to grow the Canadian economy,” he said, citing Prime Minister Mark Carney’s commitment to incentivize private-sector investment. 

Telus also recently entered the AI compute market, although the firm is directly selling processing power rather than data centre space, using chips from Nvidia. Neoclouds like Radium, Denvr Dataworks and Coreweave are also planning Canadian facilities.

After B.C., Bell plans to add AI data centres in Manitoba and Quebec. It marks a return to the market for the telecom firm, which sold 13 facilities to Equinix for US$780 million in October 2020. Bibic said AI is a different business from selling space in a conventional data centre. “You’ve got the full stack of services at the leading edge of technology,” he said.