Bell Unveils Multi Million Dollar Plan for Six Hydro-Powered AI Data Centres in B.C.
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Bell is jumping into the AI-compute race with a six-site “AI Fabric” supercluster in British Columbia, betting hundreds of millions on sovereign, hydro-powered capacity just as demand for language-model horsepower explodes. The first two centres—low-draw, seven-megawatt facilities in Kamloops and Merritt—come online this summer, showcasing recycled heat for campus buildings and Groq LPUs that promise blistering inference speeds at thrift-store energy costs.
Phase two ratchets up the wattage: a 26-megawatt hub at Thompson Rivers University, another equal-sized centre in Kamloops, and finally a pair of 400-megawatt giants (locations TBD) built for “high-density AI workloads.” Bell says the footprint will anchor a coast-to-coast network, feeding researchers via BCNET while meeting Ottawa’s push for sovereign compute and sidestepping hydrocarbon grids.
The move fires a shot across Telus’s bow after its Nvidia-backed Rimouski factory and Kamloops site, bolstering Canada’s fledgling AI league alongside Cohere’s federally funded build and Alberta’s $100-billion wooing strategy. Bell hints Manitoba and Québec are next, but even without government cheques the telco wants a Starlink-style cadence: break ground, light racks, repeat—before global demand turns megawatt math into a bidding war.
