Canada has been producing world-class AI researchers for decades. What it has not had, until now, is the industrial compute infrastructure to keep that talent and its output on home soil. A three-year, £220 million contract between Buzz HPC, Bell Canada, and Cohere is a direct attempt to change that.
Buzz HPC, which operates under Hive Digital Technologies, is putting 2,304 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs into Bell Canada’s data center in Merritt, British Columbia. The systems run as GB200 NVL72 rack-scale units linked through Nvidia Quantum InfiniBand networking. Cohere will use that cluster to run its foundation models and AI services for government and enterprise customers across the country. Hive covered the GPU purchase through a $115 million convertible note round it closed in April 2026, and the cluster should be live sometime between late 2026 and early 2027, contributing roughly $70 million in annualized revenue once it is running.
The sovereignty framing matters here more than it does in most partnership announcements. Government and large enterprise buyers in Canada increasingly need assurance that the compute handling their data sits within Canadian jurisdiction, under Canadian operational control. Together, Bell’s national infrastructure footprint, Cohere’s AI model capabilities, and Buzz HPC’s GPU factory model give those buyers something that has not previously existed in one place.
Craig Tavares, president and COO of Buzz HPC, made that point directly, describing the combination of Bell’s national platform, Cohere’s enterprise AI solutions, Canadian-built Hypertec servers, and Buzz’s AI factory infrastructure as unique within Canada today. Frank Holmes, executive chairman of Hive Digital Technologies, went further, describing the cluster as the mechanism that turns Canada’s AI ambitions from political language into actual productive capacity.
Buzz HPC already has operational experience in Canada through earlier Nvidia AI infrastructure deployments in Manitoba, which gives the Merritt project a practical foundation rather than a greenfield start. Hive is also developing a 320 megawatt data center in the Greater Toronto area and has facilities underway in Sweden and Paraguay.
The company started life as Hive Blockchain in 2017 before pivoting toward high-performance computing. This contract is the clearest signal yet of how far that pivot has gone.
