Telecommunications giant Bell is tossing its hat into the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure ring as its competitors invest in AI data centres in anticipation of a growing demand for AI compute.
The Bell AI Fabric project aims to build six AI data centres in British Columbia (BC), which the company says make up the first “supercluster” of a planned national network. Bell declined to disclose the value of the project to BetaKit, but said it was in the hundreds of millions (“nine-figure”) range.
American computing hardware company Groq will be providing the chips that power the data centres.
“Bell’s AI Fabric will ensure that Canadian businesses, researchers, and public institutions can access high-performance, sovereign and environmentally responsible AI computing services,” Mirko Bibic, president and CEO of Bell Canada and its parent company BCE, said in a statement.
Traditional data centres provide computing power to store data and run applications. Canada is home to roughly 240 data centres, according to the Canada Energy Regulator. AI data centres, which can power training and inference of large-language models (LLMs), are significantly more energy-intensive.
While traditional data centres require between five and 10 megawatts (MW) of power, one AI “hyperscale” data centre typically demands more than 100 MW, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Per the IEA, that’s equivalent to the amount of electricity it would take to power 350,000 to 400,000 electric cars for one year—more than all fully electric cars registered in Canada in 2023.
The power needed to run data centres is expected to grow 160 percent globally by 2030 due to increased AI use, according to a May 2024 report from Goldman Sachs. This could lead data centres to produce double the emissions they do today, and consume up to four percent of the world’s energy, up from one to two percent today.
Bell said its new centres will be powered by hydroelectricity. Two data centres in Kamloops, BC, and Merritt, BC, are slated to open this year, with the first coming in June. These will run on seven MW of power, Bell claimed—on the low end of the range for AI data centres.
Two larger 26-MW AI data centres are scheduled to open over the next two years: the first at Thompson Rivers University (TRU), and the second also in Kamloops. The largest projects consist of two AI data centres, with no location determined, that will be designed for “high-density AI workloads” that Bell says will have a capacity of more than 400 MW.
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American computing hardware company Groq will be providing the chips that power the data centres. Bell said Groq’s AI chips, which it calls language processing units (LPUs), provide faster performance at lower costs compared to others on the market.
The data centre at TRU will provide students and faculty with access to compute, Bell said, not just on campus but across Canada through provincial network service provider BCNET.
Bell says the data centre’s waste heat will be repurposed to provide energy to TRU’s buildings.
The news comes two months after Telus, one of Canada’s other telecom giants, announced two AI data centres: one in Kamloops and the other in Rimouski, Que. The Rimouski project is a partnership with US chip maker Nvidia to turn an existing data centre into a facility that can power AI training and inference.
In December, the Canadian government outlined its Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, a $2-billion initiative to finance the expansion of commercial AI data centres. Telus said it engaged in preliminary discussions to receive funding through the national strategy, but is prepared to go forward without it. The feds committed an initial investment of up to $240 million to Toronto-based AI startup Cohere to build a multi-billion-dollar AI data centre, in partnership with US company CoreWeave.
A Bell spokesperson did not directly respond to a question about whether the company pursued funding through this strategy, but said it continues to engage with the government “on a number of files.”
Alberta is also trying to position itself as a leader in the space. In December, the provincial government published its own AI data centre strategy, aiming to attract $100 billion in investment to the province.
Bell told BetaKit it’s looking to expand beyond the first six data centres and develop facilities in Manitoba and Québec.
Feature image courtesy Bell.