Bell Canada will add up to 900 megawatts of artificial intelligence data centre capacity in Saskatchewan under a non-binding agreement with the provincial government announced Monday in Toronto, though the company has not named a single new project and says it will begin building only after it signs customers to use the capacity.
Bell chief executive Mirko Bibic announced the agreement alongside Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe at an event held ahead of the Canada Investment Summit and attended by Prime Minister Mark Carney, The Logic reported. The company says the full buildout could be worth $50 billion across construction, power generation and the value of the computing hardware installed in the buildings. Saskatchewan’s Crown Investments Corporation Minister Jeremy Harrison put the figure at $52 billion in a provincial statement, calling it “one of the largest private-sector investments in Saskatchewan’s history.”
The two sides described different totals because they are measuring different things. The province frames the project as a pathway to a 1.2-gigawatt AI infrastructure hub inside Saskatchewan, combining the 300 megawatts already drawing on the SaskPower grid with up to 900 megawatts of phased new capacity. The Logic reported that the same addition takes Bell’s national target for its AI Fabric division from 800 megawatts to 1.7 gigawatts, a company-wide number that counts capacity outside the province.
What is already firm is the facility under construction. Bell is building a 300-megawatt data centre in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood near Regina, announced in March at an expected cost of $1.7 billion, with the capacity pre-sold to American cloud providers Cerebras and CoreWeave, according to The Logic. Everything announced Monday sits on top of that project, and the document covering it is a memorandum rather than a commitment.
The expansion also changes how Bell will power the business. The Sherwood site draws electricity from SaskPower, but Saskatchewan’s data centre framework, released in August, requires developers to supply their own power for new builds. The Logic reported that Bell will contract with electricity producers for dedicated natural gas generation, and that if the company adds all the capacity it is planning in the province, its AI infrastructure business will be majority powered by natural gas. Bell started that business in British Columbia in May 2025 with an emphasis on hydroelectricity. The company says the new facilities will use closed-loop cooling and will not draw from the local water table.
The province says the expansion could support up to 500 permanent jobs tied to data centre operations and power generation, roughly 3,000 additional jobs in areas including security, logistics and maintenance, and about 100 management positions at a Bell AI Fabric head office to be set up in Saskatchewan. Those are provincial estimates. The province also notes that municipal permitting processes and bylaws apply, and that projects meeting the legal definition of a development may require an environmental impact assessment.
Data sovereignty was the framing on both sides. Moe said the investment would strengthen Canadian data sovereignty “by keeping Canadian data here at home, stored by a Canadian company and protected under Canadian rules,” adding that the “home ice advantage” means Canadians set the rules. Saskatchewan’s framework, released in August, prioritizes Canadian ownership, a Canadian head office, operating experience and a bring-your-own-power requirement, criteria that align closely with how Bell sells its AI infrastructure. Bell is also among more than 20 companies that have signed voluntary federal principles on data centre development.
Data centre proposals have drawn protests at local and provincial hearings across the country over power use, water and land, including against Bell’s Sherwood project.
The announcement came as the two-day Canada Investment Summit opened in Toronto, an event the federal government has said is aimed at catalyzing $1 trillion in investment in Canada over five years.
Reporting by Murad Hemmadi for The Logic, Sept. 14, 2026, and a Government of Saskatchewan statement carried by SaskToday and 620 CKRM, Sept. 14, 2026.
