Bell Canada and Cisco Partner to Build Sovereign AI Infrastructure

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 29, Bell Canada and Cisco signed a memorandum of cooperation, planning to jointly build sovereign AI infrastructure for the Canadian market. The collaboration will integrate Bell's data center space, power, cooling, physical security, network connectivity, and operational capabilities in Canada with Cisco's technologies in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, observability, infrastructure monitoring and management, and critical infrastructure, to provide government agencies, regulated industries, and enterprises with infrastructure for deploying, running, and scaling AI workloads within Canada.

The two parties will advance the collaboration in three parts. The first part is to build a Canadian domestic sovereign AI platform, integrating Bell's existing data center and network resources with Cisco's AI infrastructure, security, and management technologies; the second part is to study the adoption of Cisco's AI POD modular architecture to configure computing, networking, and security resources according to different AI training, inference, and enterprise application workloads; the third part is to design a business model billed by usage or reserved capacity, providing customers with different scales of AI infrastructure usage.

This collaboration will connect to Bell's existing AI Fabric infrastructure system. Bell's AI Fabric partner ecosystem already covers high-performance computing, server hardware, networking, AI models, and cloud services. Cisco currently handles the data center networking and converged infrastructure segments, and plans to combine with NVIDIA technology to form an AI factory-type infrastructure solution.

Bell is simultaneously expanding Canada's domestic AI computing infrastructure. On September 14, Bell signed a non-binding memorandum of cooperation with the Government of Saskatchewan, planning to add up to 900 MW of AI infrastructure capacity in the province, bringing the province's planned AI infrastructure scale to 1.2 GW. The new facilities will be developed in phases, with supporting energy to be provided by natural gas power generation facilities built by partners, and will adopt a closed-loop cooling system to reduce dependence on municipal water. The Canadian government has announced that the project's capital investment scale could reach up to CAD 52.5 billion.

Bell is also deploying sovereign AI applications for real business operations within Canada. On September 23, Bell's cybersecurity business and Cohere put a cybersecurity-specific large model into production operation. The model is deployed on Bell's AI Fabric infrastructure, with AI computing and sensitive security data retained within Canada, and connected to Bell's autonomous security operations center for threat intelligence analysis and investigation processes.