Canadian telco Bell has confirmed plans for a data center development in Saskatchewan and named AI cloud firms CoreWeave and Cerebras as customers.

Bell Canada and the Government of Saskatchewan this week announced a 300MW data center outside Regina in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood. Cerebras and CoreWeave have been secured as the tenants for the new facility.

Construction is scheduled to begin this spring. The facility will come online in stages, with individual data halls entering service on a rolling basis. The first stage is expected to come online in the first half of 2027 and reach full build-out by the end of the year. An investor presentation suggests the site is entirely pre-leased.

The campus will reportedly be Bell’s largest-ever investment in Saskatchewan and will “significantly increase Canada’s domestic compute capacity while supporting Saskatchewan’s long-term economic growth and diversification.”

“Bell is drawing on its historic roots as a Canadian technology leader and nation builder through ambitious projects like Bell AI Fabric, by building a digital backbone to power the future of the Canadian economy,” said Mirko Bibic, president & CEO, BCE and Bell Canada. “Today’s announcement is an exciting illustration of the impact of Bell’s strategic priority to lead in enterprise with AI-powered solutions. Our largest-ever investment in Saskatchewan will deliver the cutting-edge, high-performance compute necessary to innovate at speed, bring major economic benefits to the province, and create a competitive advantage for our country.”

News that Bell was looking to develop on a 160-acre site in Sherwood surfaced in February. The campus will be located on greenfield land along Park Street Road, close to an existing SaskPower substation. The facility will be linked to Bell’s national fiber backbone through a partnership with SaskTel.

Bell last year announced plans to build AI data centers across the country, starting with six data centers in British Columbia, supported by 500MW of hydroelectric power. At the time, the company said it would bring a 7MW facility online in Kamloops alongside chip firm Groq, followed by two other 26MW facilities in the area. A 7MW facility was also planned in Merritt, British Columbia. Bell is also partnering with Hive’s AI cloud unit Buzz for a 5MW Nvidia GPU cluster in Manitoba. The telco is also planning an AI facility in partnership with Ontario-based Queen’s University.

Bell previously sold a portfolio of data centers across Canada to Equinix in 2020, retaining a handful of key networking facilities. Bell also has an Edge data center business in the US through its recent acquisition of Ziply Fiber.

Most of Canada’s data centers are clustered around Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver – alongside growing interest across Alberta. Saskatchewan has a small data center market, with the likes of local telco SaskTel and a few local players having a handful of facilities in Saskatoon and Regina.

Two large developments in Saskatchewan have been recently proposed by developers in Moose Jaw and Saskatoon.

US AI cloud firm CoreWeave has some 850MW of “active power” across 43 data centers, according to its latest quarterly results, with some 5GW of capacity planned out to 2030.

In Canada, CoreWeave previously announced plans for a Canadian deployment in late 2024 alongside AI firm Cohere, though details weren’t shared. The company currently lists one Canadian cloud region (CA-East-01) in Ontario: it is a ‘dedicated access’ zone reserved for select customers.

“Canada has an extraordinary AI ecosystem, and expanding access to advanced compute will help unlock new opportunities for innovation, economic growth and scientific discovery. We’re excited to work with Bell AI Fabric to deliver the high-performance AI infrastructure researchers, enterprises, and developers need to innovate at scale,” said Sachin Jain, CoreWeave COO.

Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder, Cerebras, added: “AI is becoming foundational national infrastructure. Countries want AI systems that are fast, energy-efficient, and sovereign by design, and partnering with Bell allows us to bring industry-leading AI compute to Canada in a way that aligns with these national priorities.”

Cerebras, which develops wafer-scale chips placed inside its proprietary IT hardware systems, last year announced plans to launch six new AI inference data centers across North America and Europe – including more than 300 CS-3 systems at a now live Scale Datacenter facility in Oklahoma City.

Cerebras has inference clusters live in Santa Clara and Stockton, California (the latter at Nautilus’ floating barge facility), and Dallas, Texas.

In Canada, the firm is deploying in Montreal at a Bit Digital facility.