BCE plans data center expansion in Saskatchewan to 1.2 gigawatts

BCE Inc., the parent company of Bell Canada, just inked a memorandum of understanding with the Government of Saskatchewan to quadruple the capacity of its data center campus near Regina to 1.2 gigawatts. To put that number in perspective, 1.2 GW is roughly one-fifth of SaskPower’s entire available capacity of 6.1 GW. One company, one campus, one-fifth of a province’s power grid. The projected total capital investment for the full buildout exceeds $50 billion, which would make it the largest private-sector capital expenditure in Saskatchewan’s history. The deal was signed on September 14, 2026, and if it plays out as planned, it will transform a stretch of Canadian prairie into one of the continent’s most significant AI infrastructure hubs. What’s already in the ground BCE isn’t starting from scratch. The company’s Bell AI Fabric campus already has a 300 MW facility under construction, carrying a $1.7 billion capital expenditure price tag. About $1.3 billion of that spending is expected to land in 2026 alone. That initial phase has already locked in serious tenants. CoreWeave and Cerebras Systems, two companies sitting squarely at the center of the AI compute boom, have pre-sold cap...