TELUS is advancing plans for a major sovereign AI infrastructure cluster in British Columbia as Canada looks to scale the domestic compute capacity needed to support the next phase of artificial intelligence.
The Vancouver-based teleco announced today that it is working with the Government of Canada on a proposed Sovereign AI Factory cluster under the federal government’s Enabling Large-Scale Sovereign AI Data Centres initiative. The program is designed to support the development of high-performance AI compute infrastructure located, operated, and governed in Canada.
TELUS says the B.C. cluster will span three facilities, including an expansion of its existing Kamloops data centre and two new Vancouver sites being developed with Westbank and its partners. The project follows the launch of TELUS’ first Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec, which opened in September 2025 and is now fully sold out.
At full scale, the B.C. cluster is expected to house more than 60,000 high-performance GPUs and reach more than 150 megawatts of total capacity by 2032. TELUS says the infrastructure will support large-scale AI model training, complex simulations, fine-tuning, deployment, and inference, giving Canadian businesses, researchers, startups, public institutions, and government organizations access to advanced compute without moving sensitive data or intellectual property outside the country.
Darren Entwistle, President and CEO of TELUS, said demand for the company’s Rimouski AI Factory shows Canadian organizations want cutting-edge AI capacity built on Canadian soil.
“By scaling our infrastructure to more than 60,000 high-performance GPUs, we are doing more than just building technology; we are injecting $9 billion into the Canadian economy and safeguarding our nation’s most sensitive data,” Entwistle said.
TELUS says it has secured an initial 85 megawatts of clean, renewable power from BC Hydro for the expansion. The Kamloops AI Factory is expected to come online later this year, while the M3 facility in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood is slated to open at the end of 2026 and scale through 2028. A third facility at 150 West Georgia is expected to come online in 2029.
The company is positioning the project as both an AI infrastructure investment and a sustainability play. TELUS says the Vancouver facilities will be powered by 98 percent renewable energy and are designed to integrate with the City of Vancouver’s Neighbourhood Energy Utility in Mount Pleasant and Creative Energy’s downtown district energy system.
The company says its closed-loop liquid cooling system will reduce cooling energy consumption by 80 percent compared with traditional data centres, while recycling waste heat as carbon-free thermal energy. TELUS says the recycled heat could support the equivalent of 150,000 homes and help decarbonize more than 50 million square feet of real estate.
The project also deepens TELUS’ relationship with NVIDIA. TELUS says it is the first North American service provider to become an official NVIDIA Cloud Partner and will use advanced NVIDIA accelerated computing technology, including Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell platforms, Quantum InfiniBand, Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software.
Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President, Telecom at NVIDIA, said TELUS has already shown that sovereign AI infrastructure built on trusted telecom platforms can support AI-native companies training and deploying on Canadian infrastructure.
“This next phase of growth validates how trusted telcos like TELUS become the infrastructure layer of a nation’s economic future,” Vasishta said.
Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon called technological independence a national priority and said the collaboration with TELUS is intended to strengthen Canada’s sovereign AI capacity.
“This is how Canada competes in the AI-driven economy,” Solomon said.
The B.C. government also framed the project as part of the province’s broader strategy to direct clean electricity toward high-value economic opportunities. Ravi Kahlon, B.C.’s Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, said the province is focused on supporting projects that create good-paying jobs, advance data sovereignty, and help local companies use AI to solve real-world challenges.
Westbank Founder and CEO Ian Gillespie said the project builds on years of work around district energy and low-carbon infrastructure, describing it as a way to “use every electron twice” by pairing AI data centre capacity with heat recovery.
TELUS says the fully scaled cluster is expected to deliver approximately $9 billion in economic value to British Columbia, create more than 1,000 construction jobs, and support hundreds of high-skilled operations roles. The company also says the project will help position Vancouver as a strategic digital gateway to Asia-Pacific markets through direct, low-latency connectivity.
For Canada’s AI sector, the announcement adds another major piece to the country’s emerging sovereign compute landscape. As demand for AI infrastructure accelerates, the ability to train, deploy, and run advanced models domestically is becoming a key issue for governments, enterprises, and researchers alike.
TELUS’ proposed B.C. cluster suggests that the next phase of Canada’s AI economy will be shaped not only by models and applications, but by the data centres, power systems, cooling technologies, and network infrastructure required to support them.