Bell Expands ‘AI Fabric’ Ecosystem with Launch of Specialized Data Centre

Bell Canada this week announced the continued growth of Bell AI Fabric in Canada.

The expansion to Fabric hails via an expanded partnership with BUZZ High Performance Computing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vancouver’s HIVE Digital Technologies.

The partnership aims to deliver advanced, sovereign AI infrastructure in Merritt.

“We are excited to deliver cutting-edge AI infrastructure and deployment expertise to our customers through our partnership with BUZZ HPC at our Merritt facility,” stated John Watson, a president of AI for Bell. “This partnership provides another important layer to the Bell AI Fabric ecosystem, delivering the advanced workloads our customers need in a sovereign, private and secure Canadian facility.”

BUZZ  has secured an immediate 6.5 MW of gross capacity at the Bell AI Fabric Merritt facility with an option for potential additional power that may become available over time, according to a statement.

Expected to come online in the coming weeks, the new facility represents the next step in Bell AI Fabric’s data centre supercluster, providing Canadian organizations with computing capacity to drive innovation.

Powered by BUZZ HPC’s specialized high-density, liquid-cooled infrastructure and accelerated GPU compute, the Merritt data centre provides the design and scaling expertise required for complex AI workloads, including inference and training.

“BUZZ HPC is expanding its AI infrastructure with Bell AI Fabric across two Canadian provinces, including new capacity in British Columbia to scale near-term deployments,” remarked Craig Tavares, COO, of BUZZ. “Together, Bell and BUZZ are delivering the secure, high-performance accelerated compute Canada needs to compete globally in AI.”

Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of BUZZ, posits that “Purpose-built AI infrastructure–sometimes described as AI factories—is essential to transforming compute power into intelligence at scale and accelerating the potential of AI technology.”

“Through our partnership with Bell AI Fabric, we are providing Canadian companies with sovereign compute to help them deploy AI securely and at scale to support advanced use cases across sectors ranging from healthcare to defence and beyond,” he said.

Founded in 2017, HIVE builds and operates next-generation data centres powered by clean energy across Canada, Sweden, and Paraguay.