By Alistair Vigier is CEO of Caseway, an AI company that co-creates products with large enterprises and shares the revenue with them
Canadian telecom has spent the better part of 20 years arguing about who gets access to whose infrastructure: wholesale rates, resale, aggregated and disaggregated access, fibre. Anyone who works in this business knows how long those arguments can run.
Watching Bell and Telus build their AI businesses, I would like us to ask a few of the same questions earlier this time.
Bell announced its AI Fabric in May 2025, with plans for more than 500 megawatts of hydro-powered computing capacity across six British Columbia facilities. Those plans included a 26-megawatt data centre at Thompson Rivers University.
The partners give some sense of the ambition. BUZZ HPC is bringing GPU capacity to Merritt. The Saskatchewan development names Cerebras and CoreWeave as tenants. BCE has set a target of $2 billion in revenue from AI-powered solutions by 2028. This is becoming a substantial part of the business.
Telus is moving quickly too. Its Rimouski facility opened in September 2025 and was named Canada’s fastest supercomputer that November. By May 2026, the company’s own announcement said it was sold out. Telus is now developing a three-site B.C. cluster, starting with 85 megawatts secured from BC Hydro and planning to exceed 150 megawatts by 2032.
I want these projects to succeed. My company builds software for organizations that need to know where their data is going. More computing capacity in Canada gives us more options.
What I want to understand is how smaller businesses will get to use it.
Bell is quite explicit about the connection to its existing business. In the BUZZ announcement, it describes AI Fabric as a full-stack offering “anchored by the company’s nationwide fibre network.” The network, data centres, software and services are being sold as parts of a larger offering.
For an enterprise buyer, that could be convenient. For an independent service provider trying to serve the same buyer, it raises questions about where it fits.
Can an independent ISP buy capacity and resell it? Can a managed service provider include it in a customer contract? Can a Canadian software company secure enough capacity to make commitments of its own, without having to compete with its infrastructure supplier for the entire account?
These are ordinary commercial questions. They deserve answers that businesses can plan around.
I would not start by asking the CRTC to set GPU prices. There is a useful conversation to have among suppliers and customers before anyone reaches for a regulatory remedy. Carriers also have an opportunity to shape the arrangements themselves while these businesses are still taking form.
Start with whether there will be a resale offer, and who can qualify for it.
Bell has already named SaskTel as a partner that will bring AI products and solutions to its customers. That shows partnerships are part of the plan. It does not establish that an independent ISP or software company can obtain a wholesale product, or tell us what the conditions would be.
A prospective reseller needs to know the minimum commitment, how pricing works and what happens when capacity gets tight. If there is no intention to offer resale, say so. That answer would at least let other businesses make informed decisions.
Publishing basic access terms would help too. Nobody should expect every negotiated price to be public. But eligibility, contract lengths, allocation policies and the ability to move workloads elsewhere should not require a lengthy sales process just to understand.
A small supplier has to put a price and a delivery date in front of its customer. It cannot do that reliably on the assumption that capacity will be available when it needs it.
Bundling deserves attention before contracts become difficult to unwind. When network services and compute are sold together, buyers should understand what they can purchase separately and how the discounts work. Carriers should also consider how they would explain those arrangements if a competitor challenged them. Declaring the compute component unregulated does not, by itself, answer every question about the accompanying telecom service.
The particular services and contract terms will matter. I would rather see that work done while an offer is being designed than after a complaint arrives.
My interest is commercial, and I should be clear about it. Caseway sells software and needs computing capacity to run it. The availability and price of that capacity affect what we can offer customers.
Bell and Telus are making large investments. A workable wholesale offer could help other Canadian businesses build on them and bring the carriers customers they would otherwise have to win themselves.
I would like to know whether that is the plan. It seems a reasonable question to answer while the facilities are still being built.
