Bell to add 900 MW of AI data-centre capacity in Saskatchewan

TORONTO — Bell plans to more than double its national AI data-centre capacity under a non-binding deal with Saskatchewan, adding 900 megawatts over time and lifting its AI Fabric target from 800 megawatts to 1.7 gigawatts.

CEO Mirko Bibic announced the pact with Premier Scott Moe on Monday ahead of the Canada Investment Summit, with Prime Minister Mark Carney attending. Bell isn’t launching new sites immediately; construction follows customer contracts. The company says a full Saskatchewan buildout could be worth $50 billion across construction, power and compute hardware, and it will place an AI Fabric head office in the province.

Bell is already building a 300-megawatt, $1.7-billion facility in Sherwood near Regina, pre-sold to U.S. neoclouds Cerebras and CoreWeave and fed by SaskPower. Future projects must bring their own power under Saskatchewan’s new data-centre framework — Bell plans dedicated natural gas generation — so if the full 900 megawatts lands, AI Fabric would be majority gas-fired after earlier hydro-focused pitches. The company promises closed-loop cooling that won’t tap the local water table.

For Canadian households, another prairie compute boom is an inflation story in reverse gear: scarce turbines, gas, labour and grid gear get bid up even when the megawatts aren’t drawn from the public system — and “sovereign AI” still shows up in power bills somewhere.