Bell Canada signed a memorandum of understanding with Cisco on Sept. 29 to offer sovereign AI infrastructure to Canadian customers, as construction advances on the company’s Saskatchewan AI data centre.
The agreement covers Cisco’s AI, networking, security and infrastructure technologies, according to BNN Bloomberg. Bell said the goal is to give Canadian organizations “more flexibility in how they access and scale sovereign AI capacity.” No financial terms were disclosed.
An MOU is generally a statement of intent rather than a binding contract, and the announcement did not say when any joint offering would be available.
The deal is the latest step in Bell AI Fabric, the company’s push to sell domestic AI computing capacity to governments and businesses that want data kept under Canadian control. Bell signed a separate deal with Toronto-based Cohere in June to operate Cohere’s models on Bell AI Fabric infrastructure, BNN Bloomberg reported.
On Sept. 23, the two companies unveiled a cybersecurity-focused language model for Bell Cyber’s security operations, according to MobileSyrup. It is the first public example of that arrangement being put to work inside Bell’s own business.
The physical foundation is in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood, near Regina. Bell and Saskatchewan officials marked a construction milestone there on Oct. 1, according to CP24. Structural steel is rising across all four buildings in the first phase, more than 500 workers are on site, and the first data hall is expected to be operating in the first half of 2027.
Crown Investments Minister Jeremy Harrison called the progress “remarkable” and said the project represents the largest private-sector capital investment in the country’s history at full build-out, CP24 reported.
On Sept. 14, Bell and the Saskatchewan government announced a non-binding MOU to quadruple the site from 300 megawatts to 1.2 gigawatts, with total investment of up to $50 billion, according to iPhone in Canada. CEO Mirko Bibic said a path to 1.2 gigawatts “will give governments, businesses, researchers and innovators the secure, sovereign foundation they need to deploy AI at scale.”
Bell has said the expansion depends on securing customers, finalizing commercial agreements and obtaining permits and environmental assessments, and that there is no guarantee the full build-out will proceed. At full scale, the project could support up to 600 permanent operations jobs and about 3,000 offsite and community jobs, the company said.
The expansion falls under Saskatchewan’s “Bring Your Own Power” policy, which requires the developer to supply its own electricity. Bell has said it will use partner-developed natural gas generation and closed-loop cooling that does not need municipal water.
For Canadian businesses and public bodies, the practical question is whether sovereign capacity will arrive at a competitive price. Large U.S. cloud providers already sell AI computing in Canada, and Bell’s pitch rests on keeping data and infrastructure access under Canadian control. The Cisco pact suggests Bell wants hardware and security partners in place before the first data hall opens, but none of the agreements announced so far commits a customer to buying.
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Sources: BNN Bloomberg, CP24, iPhone in Canada, MobileSyrup.
