• Telus sold all of the capacity at its first AI factory deployment in a matter of months
• Now the Canadian telco has unveiled its expansion plan
• It is aiming to meet the growing demand for sovereign digital services
• Telus features in a new free-to-download sovereign services strategy report

Telus is emerging as something of a sovereign AI factory success story: The Canadian telco sold out all the capacity at its initial deployment within months of its commercial launch and now it is planning to build a “cluster” of three AI factories in the western province of British Columbia. 

The operator, which is one of the telcos featured in our new free-to-download DSP Leaders report, Digital Sovereignty: What It Means for Telcos, announced last April that it was planning AI factories in Rimouski, Quebec, and Kamloops, British Columbia, and the Rimouski facility came online in September last year. 

Although that initial deployment is believed to be relatively small – the Financial Post reported last year that the 10,000-square-foot facility was being equipped with 500 Nvidia Hopper H200 GPUs (graphic processing units) running on HPE servers – it sold out in less than six months. In the operator’s recent first-quarter earnings report, president and CEO Darren Entwistle noted that Telus is “expanding our compute inventory in Rimouski to meet continued demand”. 

And now Telus is working with the Canadian government and datacentre developer Westbank on the deployment of a sovereign AI factory cluster under the federal Enabling Large-Scale Sovereign AI Data Centres initiative, which aims to support the development of the “sovereign, high-performance AI compute infrastructure Canada needs to compete in the global AI economy”. 

The cluster comprises: The previously announced Kamloops facility, an expansion of the telco’s datacentre facility at that site, which will come online later this year; and two new facilities in Vancouver that are being developed in partnership with Westbank, one of which will come online later this year and scale up through to 2028, and another that will come online in 2029. Once they are all fully deployed to plan, the cluster will boast 60,000 GPUs and have a total capacity of 150 megawatts (MW) by 2032.  

“We are incredibly proud to be working with the government of Canada to help build Canada’s sovereign AI infrastructure,” stated Entwistle, who is in the final weeks of his tenure. 

And he had plenty more to say. “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 BC [British Columbia] sovereign AI cluster as a direct response to that market demand. This will serve a rapidly growing ecosystem of Canadian businesses, entrepreneurs, startups, researchers, public institutions and government organisations that require world-class AI compute without sending their data, intellectual property and competitive advantage outside Canadian borders. By scaling our infrastructure to more than 60,000 high-performance GPUs, we are doing more than just building technology; we are injecting CAN $9bn into the Canadian economy and safeguarding our nation’s most sensitive data. Furthermore, we are running these facilities on 98% clean energy and utilising our groundbreaking liquid-cooling and heat recovery technology. By recycling waste heat back into the grid, these facilities will heat more than 150,000 homes in metro Vancouver, lowering energy costs for British Columbians and eliminating the overall carbon footprint. Indeed, we are sending a clear message to the world: Canada will lead the AI revolution with uncompromising technological power and unparalleled climate leadership.”

For more on the tech underpinning the Telus AI factories and the operator’s relationship with Nvidia, see this announcement.

Telus is very clear about what it means by the term ‘sovereign’: It notes that its “Sovereign AI Factory supports the full AI development lifecycle – from model training and fine-tuning to real-world deployment to inference at large scale within a single platform – all on infrastructure owned, operated and governed entirely within Canada.” 

For more on what this means to Telus and to get the views of Hesham Fahmy, the operator’s chief information officer and chief operations officer, download the Digital Sovereignty: What It Means for Telcos report now.

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV