Vancouver data summit eyes West’s AI infrastructure boom

Data and analytics leaders from across Western Canada will gather in Vancouver on Nov. 3 and 4 for the seventh annual Big Data and Analytics West summit, as billions of dollars in artificial intelligence infrastructure spending flow into the Prairies and British Columbia.

The two-day event at the JW Marriott Parq Vancouver is organized by Toronto-based Strategy Institute. In a promotional email this week, the organizers described Western Canada as “emerging as a national hub for AI infrastructure investment” and said the region’s data community is “still in its early, formative stage.”

The claim follows a string of large data centre announcements west of Ontario this year.

In July, Meta announced a $13-billion, one-gigawatt AI data centre in Sturgeon County, north of Edmonton. It is the company’s first data centre in Canada and is to be powered by an adjacent $4.6-billion natural gas plant, The Canadian Press reported.

In September, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced at Canada’s first national investment summit in Toronto that Bell Canada will quadruple its planned Saskatchewan data centre to 1.2 gigawatts. Carney said the project is expected to bring in more than $50 billion in capital investment, the largest in the province’s history.

“It is the largest sovereign AI infrastructure network in Canada,” Carney said at the time.

In British Columbia, Bell announced in May 2025 that it planned six hydro-powered AI data centres with about 500 megawatts of capacity under its Bell AI Fabric project, including sites in Kamloops and Merritt.

A federal government document prepared last year for Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon put Canada’s existing AI data centre capacity at about 337 megawatts, with more than 20 gigawatts of projects “under planning or development,” according to The Canadian Press.

The buildout has also drawn public pushback. Alberta Technology Minister Nate Glubish faced criticism at two in-person town halls in August over water use, electricity bills and how close data centres can be built to homes, and a provincial regulator rejected a proposed project in Olds, north of Calgary, over its proximity to residences.

The Vancouver summit focuses less on the hardware than on what organizations do with data and AI once the infrastructure exists. The program lists themes including sovereign AI infrastructure, moving AI from pilot projects into production, preparing enterprise data for AI agents and responsible AI governance.

Scheduled speakers include Alexandra Flatt of the Provincial Health Services Authority, Cecile Tao of Vancity, Gerry Sinclair of Vancouver Airport, Gerry Akkerman of Legal Aid BC, Shaun Gilligan of QuadReal Group and Casper Shyr of Fraser Health, according to the event website.

Sessions described by organizers include a talk by Fahad Zaidi of Neo Financial on increasing output without adding staff, a presentation from QuadReal’s research team on how one analyst used AI to build a platform that now informs investment decisions, and a session by Mahsa Bataghva of ICBC on embedding AI recommendations into frontline decisions.

Xiaonan Liu of Meta is scheduled to speak on linking model evaluation to business results, and winners of the Vancouver Analytics Board Legends Award, including Rini Gupta of Telus, are to discuss what has and has not worked in real-world AI adoption.

The second day closes with a session on what will separate West Coast AI leaders from everyone else by 2028.

Organizers said group pricing for teams of four or more starts at $1,095 per person. More information is available on the Big Data West summit website.

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