XCH Miner

12, Nov

HIVE to Provide GPU Backbone Support for Canada's Sovereign AI Cloud

Bell will deploy these machines in new data centers to support its AI Fabric platform and integrate it with fiber optic networks and cloud services. The initial deployment will be a 5-megawatt installation in Manitoba later this year, with plans for further deployments at other Bell AI Fabric sites. HIVE did not provide revenue projections for this collaboration.

This partnership allows Bell's government and enterprise customers access to NVIDIA compute resources at BUZZ HPC for applications such as training base models and fine-tuning existing ones.

Bell Canada, commonly known as Bell, is the country's largest telecommunications operator and a subsidiary of BCE Inc., a company with a market capitalization of approximately C$40 billion. The company serves millions of residential and commercial customers in wireless, broadband, television, and media, and operates enterprise-grade data center networks for government and businesses.

Bell AI Fabric is Bell Canada's flagship artificial intelligence infrastructure project, announced in May 2025 as part of a multi-year plan to create a nationally focused AI data center network.

This plan is positioned as the country's largest sovereign AI computing project, aiming to provide up to 500 megawatts of hydropower capacity across at least six facilities.

Deployment began in June in Kamloops, British Columbia, at a 7 MW AI inference facility developed in partnership with US chipmaker Groq. Its Language Processing Unit (LPU) is designed to reduce the cost per token for inference tasks on large language models. A second 7 MW site is planned for Merritt, British Columbia, by the end of this year.

Further phases include a 26 MW facility planned for 2026 at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, which will serve as a training and inference hub for students and faculty. A second 26 MW hub is expected in 2027. In addition, two high-density facilities with a total capacity exceeding 400 MW are planned, also powered by British Columbia's hydroelectric grid.

Bell's plan is to connect these Western Canadian hyperclusters to future sites across the country. The company defines the project as a business opportunity and a national strategy to ensure secure, sovereign access to advanced AI infrastructure in Canada without relying on US hyperscale providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.