TELUS Locks 60,000 GPUs Across Three BC Sites for Canada's $9B Sovereign AI Cluster
TELUS and the Government of Canada announced May 11 that they are advancing a sovereign AI factory cluster across three British Columbia facilities — the most substantial national AI infrastructure commitment in Canadian history.
The Numbers
- 60,000+ high-performance NVIDIA GPUs at full build-out
- 150 MW of total capacity by 2032
- $9B injected into the Canadian economy
- 85 MW of clean BC Hydro power already secured for the initial build
- 98% clean energy across all three sites
- Waste heat recycled to warm 150,000 homes in metro Vancouver
Three Sites, Three Timelines
The cluster is modular and demand-driven:
- Kamloops AI Factory — expansion of existing data centre, online later in 2026
- M3, Vancouver Mount Pleasant — opens end of 2026, scales through 2028
- 150 West Georgia, Vancouver — online 2029, completes the 150 MW cluster
TELUS says its first sovereign AI factory in Rimouski, Quebec is already sold out — the BC expansion is a direct response to demand that exceeded initial projections.
NVIDIA Partnership
TELUS is the first North American service provider to hold official NVIDIA Cloud Partner status. The BC cluster will run NVIDIA Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell platforms connected via NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, on NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. That means Canadian organisations can access the same infrastructure tier as the largest hyperscalers without routing data outside the country.
The full platform spans model training, fine-tuning, and production deployment within a single on-shore stack — the explicit pitch to government and regulated industries that need Canadian data residency.
Why This Matters
Most sovereign AI announcements are policy documents. This one has anchor tenants, signed power agreements, and construction timelines. The Rimouski sell-out gives TELUS proof of demand. The three-site BC structure gives government a tangible infrastructure commitment it can point to.
Canada has been notably absent from the first wave of hyperscale AI infrastructure concentrated in the US. The TELUS cluster — if it executes on timeline — represents a credible alternative for Canadian research institutions, financial firms, healthcare systems, and federal agencies that cannot or will not route workloads through US-controlled compute.
The counter-risk: Vera Rubin GPUs are constrained globally through at least 2027, and TELUS hasn’t disclosed its allocation or pricing. Sixty thousand GPUs on paper and sixty thousand delivered are different things.