Telus on Wednesday announced the opening of its Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec, calling it the first fully sovereign AI factory in Canada.
Now operational and serving customers, the secure facility is powered by NVIDIA graphic processing units (GPUs), computing infrastructure designed by HPE, Telus’s PureFibre network and 99-per-cent renewable energy, according to a Telus press release.
“Today marks a defining milestone for Canada’s digital future,” Darren Entwistle, Telus president and CEO, said in a statement. “Indeed, with the launch of our nation’s first fully Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, we are maximizing Canadian autonomy over sensitive data. Businesses, researchers and governments should not have to rely on foreign-controlled systems to advance their AI ambitions. Today, we are helping to achieve that: by delivering advanced compute power within data centres built, owned and operated by Canadians, TELUS is safeguarding our data, protecting our sovereignty and empowering our economy.
“From Rimouski today and Kamloops tomorrow, we are creating the backbone for Canada’s productivity, competitiveness and global leadership in the digital era. TELUS’ pioneering AI factories leverage the latest-generation technology from industry leaders like NVIDIA and HPE, and are powered by the billions of dollars we have already invested in our world-leading PureFibre network. Importantly, TELUS is providing the secure, sovereign foundation our country needs to create made-in-Canada solutions, accelerate growth and secure our place in the digital economy for generations to come,” Entwistle said.
Telus said it is the first North American service provider to join the NVIDIA Cloud Partner network, and its new Sovereign AI Factory will give its customers access to NVIDIA’s most advanced technology, high-performance reference architecture and software stack “that can dramatically reduce AI deployment time and costs.”
“TELUS’ Sovereign AI Factory will empower organizations with total, end-to-end development capabilities to build new AI models (model training), customize existing ones for specific needs (fine-tuning) and deploy them in business operations (inferencing),” Telus’s press release said.
Organizations that will use Telus’s fully sovereign platform to advance AI innovation in Canada include League, Accenture and OpenText, according to the press release.
Healthcare consumer experience provider League will run its suite of AI-powered healthcare solutions using the Telus Sovereign AI Factory, enabling it to deliver enhanced personalized healthcare experiences to millions of Canadian users and improve patient outcomes while storing sensitive healthcare data within Canada’s borders.
Accenture will develop and deploy industry-specific solutions on Telus’s Sovereign AI Factory platform, accelerating AI adoption across its Canadian clients in sovereignty-sensitive and highly regulated sectors including public services, healthcare, critical infrastructure and financial services.
As announced this summer, OpenText will leverage Telus’s AI factory to deliver sovereign, more secure and scalable cloud AI solutions through its Aviator AI platform, serving more than 1,600 Canadian enterprise and government customers with enterprise-grade cloud computing and AI that provides data residency, security and compliance.
“TELUS’ new sovereign AI initiative is a welcome addition to Canada’s growing digital infrastructure,” said Evan Solomon, federal minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, in Telus’s press release. “Expanding data and compute capacity here at home supports the government’s vision for AI-driven productivity and competitiveness. By keeping data and compute within Canada, TELUS is contributing to responsible innovation and strengthening our broader economic objectives — alongside the many other partners building critical data centres across the country.”
Solomon and Industry Minister Melanie Joly have previously praised Telus and Bell for their investments in sovereign AI facilities.
In May, Bell announced ambitious plans to build a data centre supercluster in British Columbia that will eventually provide up to 500 megawatts of hydroelectric-powered AI compute capacity across six facilities, as part of its Bell AI Fabric strategy.
On Tuesday, SaskTel announced it is partnering with Deloitte Canada to launch an AI factory in Saskatchewan that will use SaskTel’s existing data centre assets.
Photo courtesy of Telus
