BCE Inc., which happens to be the largest telecom company of Canada by revenue, is going to set up a network of artificial intelligence centers from the country, thereby radiating an aggressive AI infrastructure build-out that is taking place in the US as well as abroad.
It is well to be noted that Bell Canada is looking forward to investing hundreds of millions of dollars in order to build certain data centers in six Canadian cities, said Mirko Bibic, the CEO of the company. The first site is expected to come up in the month of June 2025 within the British Columbia city of Kamloops. It will be having start-up Groq, which is the US-based AI chip manufacturer, as the anchor tenant. There are certain other facilities also that have been planned in the province, such as Quebec and Manitoba, in the years to come, confirmed Bell.
The company expects that once the project, which is called the Bell AI Fabrics, is completed, it will have 500 MW of capacity, which is a sizeable amount in order to support AI applications. However, it is far less as compared to the multi-gigawatt facilities that are under development across the US, Asia, and the Middle East. Groq is going to be the exclusive inference partner for the new Canadian data center network, said the start-up founder as well as the CEO, Jonathan Ross.
Apparently, there are a growing number of countries that are working in order to expand their homegrown AI network as well as capabilities, which is a kind of push called sovereign AI. In May 2025, Saudi Arabia, which also happens to be a Groq partner as well as the UAE, went ahead to announce plans to work with Nvidia and OpenAI, the US tech firms, when it comes to local AI infrastructure build-out. These moves are fueled by rising demand when it comes to computing resources in order to run models as well as the desire for AI systems that are personalized in order to meet the local requirements as well as languages. According to Bibic, they look forward to making sure that when someone is talking about cloud as well as AI in Canada, they have capabilities operated and managed by Canadians. He added that they don’t really require Canada to be turned off. Should there be any kind of political issue, they want to make sure that they have access when it comes to technology, which holds the key to giving thrust to the Canadian economy.
Although Canadian researchers such as Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have gone on to pioneer many of the breakthroughs that are underpinning the present artificial intelligence boom, the country has indeed not moved as much forward when it comes to the push to commercialize the technology, said Bibic.
He added that it is indeed a classic Canadian thing. They always lead when it comes to the research and innovation part, and when it comes to scale-up as well as commercialization, they always lag behind.
It is well to be noted that BCE is not the only Canadian firm that is trying to better position the country when it comes to the AI era. Companies like Telus Corp., which is another large telecom provider, have gone on to say that they are investing more than C$70 billion in the next five years in order to expand as well as elevate their own network infrastructure along with functions throughout Canada. Part of this is going to be a bid to support data centers, or what Telus often goes on to call the sovereign AI factories.
It is worth noting that the push of Canada towards more local AI data centers also goes on to tap into the growing demand when it comes to inference, or the process in terms of running an AI model after getting trained. While the data centers that are focused on training AI can get placed almost everywhere without even land, it is the location that actually matters much more when it comes to inference, as it is more about speed.
According to Jonathan Ross, from Groq, which apparently focuses on chips when it comes to inference, sovereign has been a big part of their business.
Ross went on to say that at present, Groq has over 1.6 million developers who happen to use its services with the choice to go ahead and select an AI model as well as a data center location in order to process the queries. At present, the dropdown menu of Groq goes on to offer a choice of a couple of US locations or the Middle East. Once the site at Kamloops is functional, Canada is going to be added to the list.