By Adriano Marchese

BCE-owned Canadian telecom major Bell Canada is diving into artificial intelligence, starting with plans to build a super cluster of data centers in British Columbia, the first of which is slated to go online next month.

Bell, one of Canada's four major telcos, said Wednesday that it will build out a national network starting with six facilities in British Columbia with the potential to provide 500 megawatts of hydro-electric-powered AI-compute capacity.

The move comes as more countries and big tech companies pour large sums of money into AI-infrastructure to power everything from electric vehicles to search bots. In Canada, Montreal-based Bell isn't the first to dip its toes into the space. In mid-April, Telus said it plans to establish its first sovereign-AI factories in Rimouski, Quebec and Kamloops, British Columbia.

Bell said the first of its AI Fabric facilities will come online next month in partnership with AI-inference provider Groq and the launch of their 7-megawatt AI-inference facility in Kamloops. Other AI facilities are slated to become operational by the end of next year.

The company said two other AI data centers with a combined capacity of more than 400 megawatts are also in advanced planning stages with stakeholders.

Write to Adriano Marchese at adriano.marchese@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 28, 2025 09:15 ET (13:15 GMT)

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