How TELUS is Expanding Canada's Sovereign AI Network

There is a new race unfolding in the telco industry and it is not about spectrum auctions or 5G rollouts.

Instead, telcos are competing to become the driving force of national AI infrastructure, building the data centres, fibre networks and compute platforms countries see as strategic assets.

In Canada, TELUS is betting that sovereign AI infrastructure could become one of the telco industry's next major growth engines.

The company is expanding plans for a three-site AI infrastructure cluster in British Columbia, backed by the Government of Canada and property developer Westbank.

The facilities will combine high-performance GPU infrastructure with renewable energy systems and district heating networks.

TELUS says the cluster will eventually scale beyond 150MW of capacity and support more than 60,000 NVIDIA GPUs across sites in Kamloops and Vancouver.

“We are incredibly proud to be working with the Government of Canada to help build Canada's sovereign AI infrastructure,” says Darren Entwistle, CEO of TELUS.

“The unprecedented demand that completely sold out our first AI Factory in Rimouski proves that Canadian innovators want cutting-edge AI built right here on Canadian soil.

“Following this modular, demand-driven approach, we are developing our B.C. sovereign AI cluster as a direct response to that market demand.

“This will serve a rapidly growing ecosystem of Canadian businesses, entrepreneurs, start-ups, researchers, public institutions and government organisations that require world-class AI compute without sending their data, intellectual property and competitive advantage outside Canadian borders.”

TELUS says the wider project could contribute US$9bn to the Canadian economy while operating on 98% clean energy.

Telcos move deeper into AI infrastructure

The expansion builds on the launch of TELUS’ first Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec, which opened in September 2025.

The company describes the site as Canada’s fastest and most powerful commercially available supercomputer on the TOP500 ranking.

TELUS says capacity at the facility has already sold out, prompting the next phase of expansion in British Columbia.

The telco company has also secured an initial 85MW of renewable energy capacity through BC Hydro to support the rollout.

The Kamloops AI Factory is expected to open later this year, followed by the M3 facility in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant district at the end of 2026. A third site at 150 West Georgia is scheduled for 2029.

At full scale, the facilities are designed to support large AI model training and production AI deployments using accelerated computing platforms from NVIDIA.

“Securing Canada's technological independence is a national priority, and it requires building the infrastructure to back it up,” said Evan Solomon, Canada's Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.

“By working with TELUS, we are taking concrete action to strengthen Canada's sovereign AI capacity and ensure that Canadian innovation, data and economic advantages are anchored in Canada.

“This is how Canada competes in the AI-driven economy.”

TELUS says the platform is designed around sovereign infrastructure principles, with systems owned and operated entirely within Canada.

The infrastructure supports the full AI lifecycle including training, fine-tuning, inference and deployment workloads.

As part of the rollout, TELUS also plans to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin and NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems connected through NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking.

“TELUS has proven over the past year that sovereign AI infrastructure built on trusted telecom platforms delivers real results; in fact, AI-native companies are already training, deploying and scaling on TELUS' NVIDIA-powered platform,” said Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President, Telecom, at NVIDIA.

“This next phase of growth validates how trusted telcos like TELUS become the infrastructure layer of a nation's economic future.”

Sustainability built into the network

Alongside AI compute capacity, TELUS is positioning sustainability as a core part of the project.

The Vancouver facilities are designed to connect into district energy systems including the City of Vancouver’s Neighbourhood Energy Utility and Creative Energy’s downtown network.

Waste heat generated by the infrastructure is expected to help heat up to 150,000 homes across metro Vancouver.

TELUS says the wider infrastructure will support the decarbonisation of more than 50m sq ft of real estate.

The company also claims its closed-loop liquid cooling system reduces cooling energy consumption by 80% compared with conventional data centres while cutting water use by 90%.

Beyond infrastructure, the project is expected to create more than 1,000 construction jobs alongside operational roles tied to AI infrastructure management and data centre operations.

The investment also strengthens Vancouver’s position as a connectivity gateway between North America and Asia-Pacific markets through low-latency network routes.

It reinforces how telco operators are increasingly tying together fibre, cloud, AI and data centre infrastructure into a single strategy.