TORONTO — Bell is putting its network of AI partnerships to work to provide new compute capacity for Cohere.

Under a deal announced Thursday, government and business customers will be able to use Cohere’s AI tools via Buzz HPC’s cloud, running on Hypertec hardware in an expanded Bell data centre in Merritt, B.C. The setup will power a technology package the telecom giant is touting as Canadian and sovereign in all the places that matter.

“Too much of our AI computing capacity is being served from other places, particularly the U.S.,” Bell CEO Mirko Bibic told The Logic. “This is an illustration of how we can do it here.”

The new development is one of the first major projects for the Canadian Sovereign AI Alliance, a loose coalition of companies led by Bell to sell technology that’s developed or controlled domestically.

Over the last year, the telecom giant has formed partnerships with Cohere to host its AI tools and jointly sell them to governments and businesses; with Hypertec to kit out its data centres with the Montreal-based firm’s hardware; and with Vancouver-based HIVE Digital Technologies’ Buzz HPC division to run compute clusters at Bell facilities in British Columbia and Manitoba. 

Cohere is the customer in this case, Bibic said, adding that the project illustrates how the alliance can work. The group has put together a “fully domestic” and “fully sovereign” stack of technology, Bibic said. “It enables practical AI adoption and production at scale.” Canadian firms control the facilities, network, infrastructure, software and models, though the chips will come from U.S. firm Nvidia.

Other members of the alliance include equipment manufacturer Celestica, AI search firm Coveo and cloud provider ThinkOn, which are not involved with the project announced Thursday.

Cohere historically bought compute capacity from U.S. hyperscalers like Google and Oracle, and also made its models available to customers via U.S. cloud services. In December 2024, Ottawa awarded Cohere $240 million to help pay for processing power from a new data centre that CoreWeave set up in Cambridge, Ont. New Jersey-based CoreWeave, in turn, is one of Bell’s tenants for a new 300-megawatt facility in Sherwood, Sask.

The new deal gives Cohere “another way to support customers in Canada with advanced AI,” said the firm’s Canada country manager Michael Pelosi, and do it on “infrastructure that reflects Canadian priorities.”

Cohere touts its technology as sovereign in part because clients can run its models and North agent builder system on their own hardware. It also sells access to software running on its own compute, and recently launched a service under which it sets up and manages dedicated infrastructure for customers.

Buzz already occupies Bell’s existing 6.5-megawatt facilities in Merritt, one of the six sites that the telecom firm initially identified when it announced its expansion into AI data centres in May 2025. Bibic said the expansion to serve Cohere will be similar in size to the current facility. 

All alliance members are betting there’ll be a significant Canadian market for sovereign AI, which they generally define as technology that runs within the country and always remains under Canadian control. Canadian governments are expected to account for a significant part of that demand. 

The new national AI strategy, which Ottawa released earlier this month, promised to use federal contracts to spur the development of domestic AI companies and infrastructure. Ottawa has also committed to consider technology made by Cohere specifically.

Bibic expects Bell’s AI business will eventually land both large government and enterprise customers, and that they will want “a full sovereign solution.” When that happens, the firm will assemble alliance members based on a client’s specific needs. “Each layer of the stack, there is a Canadian player,” Bibic said, although he added Bell can also use SAP’s software to offer a domestically hosted cloud service.