TELUS is planning a major expansion of its artificial intelligence infrastructure in British Columbia as part of a push to scale Canada’s sovereign AI capacity.
The Vancouver-based telecom company announced that it is working with the Government of Canada on a proposed Sovereign AI Factory cluster under Ottawa’s Enabling Large-Scale Sovereign AI Data Centres initiative.
The B.C. cluster would include three facilities: an expansion of TELUS’ existing Kamloops data centre and two new Vancouver sites being developed with Westbank and its partners. TELUS says the project follows the launch of its 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 training, fine-tuning, deployment, inference, simulations, and other advanced workloads for Canadian businesses, researchers, startups, public institutions, and governments.
“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,” said Darren Entwistle, President and CEO of TELUS.
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 expected to open at the end of 2026 and scale through 2028. A third facility at 150 West Georgia (pictured) is slated to come online in 2029.
The company is also positioning the project as a sustainability play. TELUS says its Vancouver facilities will be powered by 98 percent renewable energy and designed to integrate with Vancouver’s Neighbourhood Energy Utility in Mount Pleasant and Creative Energy’s downtown district energy system.
TELUS says its closed-loop liquid cooling system will reduce cooling energy use by 80 percent compared with traditional data centres while recycling waste heat as carbon-free thermal energy.
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.
Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon said technological independence is a national priority and described the collaboration as a way to strengthen Canada’s sovereign AI capacity.
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.
For Vancouver’s tech ecosystem, the announcement adds significant weight to B.C.’s growing role in the AI infrastructure race, connecting clean power, advanced compute, data sovereignty, and next-generation digital infrastructure.
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