Telus headquarters in downtown Vancouver in 2025. Telus’s new data facilities will house more than 60,000 graphics processing units from Nvidia Corp. once fully operational, according to the telecom company.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
Telus Corp. T-T said it will develop two data centres in Vancouver and expand an existing facility in Kamloops to handle artificial intelligence workloads. Together, the three facilities will require more than 150 megawatts of electricity by 2032.
The data centre in Kamloops will come online later this year, as will a repurposed facility in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, and then scale up.
The third, a new development by BC Place in downtown Vancouver, will become operational in 2029. It is slated to be the largest, spanning 400,000 square-feet with the capacity for up to 100 MW of electricity.
Demand for facilities to train and run AI models and applications is surging, as adoption of the technology grows. Countries, including Canada, are also trying to ensure they have the infrastructure to support AI development and lessen dependence on American tech giants.
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Meanwhile, Telus – like its rival, Bell Canada parent company BCE Inc. BCE-T – has been investing in artificial intelligence and data centres in recent years in search of new areas of growth. Last year, Telus converted an existing data centre in Rimouski, Que. to handle AI processing.
Telus did not immediately say how much it intends to spend on these new data centres.
The 2025 federal budget tasked AI Minister Evan Solomon to identify and negotiate “new promising AI infrastructure projects” with industry, while taking steps to enable the Canada Infrastructure Bank to invest in these developments. Mr. Solomon has said that Ottawa is open to providing financial backstops and off-take agreements, where the government purchases capacity, in order to complete data centre deals.
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada put out a call for proposals under a program to support large-scale AI data centres earlier this year. Criteria include economic benefits and Indigenous participation, among other factors.
Telus said it is in talks with the federal government about the program.
Telus’s new facilities will house more than 60,000 graphics processing units from Nvidia Corp. once fully operational, according to the telecom company, making it a sizable cluster for Canada.
In March, Bell Canada announced it would spend $1.7-billion over two years to build a 300-megawatt data centre outside Regina, Saskatchewan, part of its overall strategy to offer a range of AI services to businesses.
Unlike Telus, Bell is not building out the internal technology itself, but leasing space to two tenants – Cerebras and CoreWeave – to add their own GPUs.
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With cellphone plan prices down and population growth stalling, Canada’s largest telecom companies have seen revenue growth from their core businesses slow in recent years.
At the same time, telecom companies are cutting overall capital spending as they seek to pay down heavy debt loads and improve their balance sheets, after years of heavy outlays on infrastructure and acquisitions.
Telus has estimated it will spend $2.3-billion in capital expenditures this year, 10 per cent less than it spent last year.
More to come