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 says it will develop two data centres in Vancouver and expand an existing facility in Kamloops to handle artificial-intelligence workloads – all of which will require a combined 150-plus megawatts of electricity by 2032.
The data centre in Kamloops will come online later this year, as will a data centre in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood that is being set up in an existing building. That facility will scale up through 2028.
The third, a new development by BC Place in downtown Vancouver, will become operational in 2029. It is slated to be the largest of the three, spanning 400,000 square feet with the capacity to consume up to 100 MW of electricity.
The project will also receive support from the federal government, as the first successful applicant to be announced under an AI data-centre program launched earlier this year by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. However, details of Ottawa’s involvement are so far scarce.
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Demand for facilities to train and run AI models and applications is surging as adoption of the technology grows. Canada and other countries are also trying to ensure they have the infrastructure to support AI development and lessen dependence on U.S. tech giants.
“This expansion will ensure we meet the continued demand and serve growing AI ecosystems coming from Canadian businesses, entrepreneurs, startups, researchers and, yes, government at all levels,” Telus chief executive officer Darren Entwistle said at a news conference in Vancouver Monday morning.
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.
It did not say how much it intends to spend on these new data centres.
“While we don’t disclose specific investment amounts for competitive reasons, any related capital spend in 2026 is covered under our existing capital envelope, and the outlook for 2026 hasn’t changed,” Telus spokesperson Liz Sauvé said.
Telus has estimated it will spend $2.3-billion in capital expenditures this year, 10 per cent less than it spent last year.
Canada’s largest telecom companies have been cutting capital spending in recent quarters, as they seek to pay down heavy debt loads after years of substantial outlays on infrastructure and acquisitions, and as lower cellphone plan prices and static population numbers have slowed revenue growth from their core businesses.
Monday’s announcement marks the start of negotiations between the federal government and Telus to determine how the two parties will work together on the project, AI Minister Evan Solomon said. A memorandum of understanding will follow, though the timeline for this remains unclear.
“We will have more to share once those discussions conclude,” Ms. Sauvé said.
The 2025 federal budget tasked Mr. Solomon with identifying and negotiating “new promising AI infrastructure projects” with industry, while taking steps to enable the Canada Infrastructure Bank to invest in these developments. The minister 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 included economic benefits and Indigenous participation, among other factors. Mr. Solomon said Monday that the government received 160 applications through this program, and Telus’s project is the first of the successful applicants to be announced.
Federal Conservative MP Ben Lobb said in a statement that Canada should already be a hub for data centres, owing to its energy supplies and cool climate. “They don’t need government involvement or tax dollars, they just need the Liberal government to get out of the way,” he said.
Telus’s new facilities will house more than 60,000 graphics processing units from Nvidia Corp. once fully operational, according to the telecom, 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, 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 Inc. – to add their own GPUs.
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Telus said it was working with Vancouver real estate development firm Westbank Corp. on the new data centre projects.
Westbank has faced a challenging few years. As of 2023, the company was facing several lawsuits, along with liens, as contractors claimed millions of dollars in unpaid bills. Most recently, a court-appointed receiver said nearly $290-million is owed to 20 secured creditors in relation to Westbank’s Vancouver rental developments at 5083 Joyce St.
Mr. Solomon said the federal government will approach its work with Telus and Westbank with prudence, promising transparency and rigour. “We want to make sure this project is done right by the right people.”