Telus and the Canadian government on Monday announced they are collaborating on a proposed sovereign AI factory cluster to be built in British Columbia under the federal Enabling large-scale sovereign AI data centres initiative.
Telus, Vancouver-based real estate developer Westbank and the federal government are working together on the details of this collaboration, Telus said in a press release, as Telus scales its Sovereign AI Factory network across three facilities in B.C.
With Telus’s first Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec — which opened in September 2025 — fully sold out, Telus is expanding its existing Kamloops data centre and developing two new Vancouver facilities with Westbank and its partners, Telus explained. It is leveraging an initial 85 megawatts (MW) of clean, renewable power secured from BC Hydro to do so, it said.
Telus’s Kamloops AI factory is scheduled to come online later this year, while its M3 facility in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood will open at the end of 2026 and scale through 2028, and its 150 West Georgia facility will come online in 2029, with the cluster’s total capacity scaling to more than 150 MW by 2032, Telus said in its press release.
At full scale, the three-site cluster will house AI infrastructure featuring high-performance NVIDIA graphic processing units (GPUs) to support large-scale AI model training, complex simulations and production-scale deployment, Telus said, adding it plans to scale the cluster to more than 60,000 GPUs.
Designed as sustainable sovereign AI data centres, the Vancouver facilities will be powered by 98 per cent renewable energy and will integrate into the City of Vancouver’s Neighbourhood Energy Utility in Mount Pleasant and Creative Energy’s downtown district energy system, “supporting the decarbonization of more than 50M sq ft of real estate”, according to Telus. In addition, a closed-loop liquid cooling system will reduce cooling energy consumption by 80 per cent compared to traditional data centres, while recycling electricity as carbon-free thermal energy to heat the equivalent of 150,000 homes. Furthermore, water consumption will be 90 per cent lower than traditional data centres, with plans to incorporate recycled water from BC Place, Telus said.
“We are incredibly proud to be working with the Government of Canada to help build Canada’s sovereign AI infrastructure,” Darren Entwistle, president and CEO of Telus, said in the company’s press release. “The unprecedented demand that completely sold out our first AI Factory in Rimouski proves that Canadian innovators want cutting-edge AI built right here on Canadian soil. Following this modular, demand-driven approach, we are developing our B.C. sovereign AI cluster as a direct response to that market demand.”
The federal government’s initiative to support the building of sovereign, high-performance AI compute infrastructure in Canada was established in Budget 2025, which included a proposed investment of $925.6 million over five years, starting in 2025-26. The government indicated its intent to identify a limited number of large-scale sovereign commercial AI data centre projects and to engage with the most promising proposals through non-binding memoranda of understanding. At this point, no federal funding has been committed or distributed under the initiative, according to a Monday press release from the federal government regarding the Telus AI factory cluster project.
“Canada cannot compete in the AI economy without the infrastructure to back it up,” said Evan Solomon, Canada’s minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, in the government’s release. “By advancing this project with TELUS, we are taking concrete action to build sovereign AI capacity here in Canada, so Canadian innovators, researchers and businesses have access to the compute they need, while keeping Canadian data, intellectual property and economic advantage on Canadian soil.”
