Bell Canada is expanding its national AI infrastructure ambitions with new capacity in British Columbia, announcing that BUZZ High Performance Computing (HPC) will deploy advanced GPU infrastructure at Bell’s AI Fabric facility in Merritt.
The partnership marks a continued buildout of Bell AI Fabric, the company’s emerging network of sovereign, high-performance data centres designed to support next-generation artificial intelligence workloads across Canada.
BUZZ HPC, a subsidiary of HIVE Digital Technologies, has secured an initial 6.5 megawatts of capacity at the Merritt site, with the potential to expand further as additional power becomes available. The facility is expected to come online in the coming weeks and will support the scaling of BUZZ’s GPU-accelerated clusters for commercial AI applications.
The Merritt data centre is purpose-built for high-intensity AI workloads, including both model training and inference. It incorporates high-density, liquid-cooled infrastructure—an increasingly critical requirement as demand for compute continues to surge alongside the growth of large-scale AI models.
For Bell, the deployment represents another step toward building what it describes as a “data centre supercluster,” anchored by its national fibre network and integrated with cloud, software, and professional services. The company is positioning AI infrastructure as a major growth driver, with ambitions to generate $2 billion in AI-related revenue by 2028.
Beyond raw compute, the partnership underscores a broader push toward sovereign AI infrastructure in Canada. By combining BUZZ HPC’s expertise in GPU-accelerated systems with Bell’s domestic network and facilities, the companies are offering a fully Canadian-based stack designed to meet data residency and security requirements—an increasingly important factor for enterprises and public sector organizations.
BUZZ HPC, which is expanding deployments across multiple provinces, framed the Merritt project as part of its effort to establish a national sovereign AI platform capable of serving both domestic and international customers. The company’s infrastructure is designed to support a wide range of use cases, from healthcare and financial services to defence applications.
The concept of “AI factories”—data centres optimized specifically to convert compute into deployable intelligence at scale—is quickly becoming central to how countries and companies compete in the global AI race. Facilities like Merritt reflect a shift away from general-purpose cloud infrastructure toward highly specialized environments built for accelerated computing.
As demand for AI capacity continues to outpace supply globally, projects like Bell AI Fabric’s Merritt site signal Canada’s intent to play a more active role in hosting and scaling the infrastructure underpinning the next wave of AI innovation.