Nobody Asked For This

We have long had concerns regarding who, precisely, in the land of maple syrup has any need of the vast quantity of GPUs that Telus intends to install into various locations across the country. We wonder because it seems to us that the demand for the compute power of so many GPUs is already being supplied by various providers around the world, not the least of which is Microsoft, for example.

Yes, yes, “sovereign AI capacity” and all that. We have been watching this story for quite some time, rest assured. Having worked in the tech industry in Canada, we know that there is a demand in some industries for data to be kept in Canada itself due to privacy laws; in our experience, health data is one of these.

Our question, more specifically, is whether there is enough of this demand to warrant the building of a 150MW data centre in the middle of one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. (Clearly our opinion is that there is not. Believe us, we wouldn’t bother writing about it unless we truly believed that Telus and their partners were being colossal idiots about this whole thing.)

So, let us take a look at Rimouski.

The Telus data centre in Rimouski, Quebec, is the site of their much-lauded supercomputer, and may serve as a guide for their plans elsewhere. They are fond of saying that its capacity is entirely sold out, which is a very trivial thing to do when there are only 500 GPUs operational there, and said GPUs are last-generation at best; but is it really sold out? Let’s take a look.

GPUs-as-a-service is supplied from Rimouski at a cost of CAD$6.50 per GPU/hour. Telus’s own website shows that all configurations of Hopper GPUs they currently provide are “available now”.

As an aside, we also note that the price of CAD$6.50 per GPU/hr is inflated for the current market. It’s completely trivial to check the current GPU/hr prices for training and inference in data centres across the world, and the current price for an equivalent GPU (when converting currencies) is CAD$4.81, supplied by a centre in London, England.

Telus, presumably, believe that “sovereign AI” will command quite the premium.

In any case, who, precisely, will be using the 60,000 GPUs that they intend to install in the data centres in Vancouver? Rest assured that a company that does not need to abide strictly by Canadian privacy laws may well decide that paying a premium to Telus is simply not worth it even as a selling point. Although it’s likely that some amount of data will have to be kept in Canada due to, for example, national security concerns, many of the provinces and even the federal government have no strict requirement to do so. Ontario is the only province that stands out as one where health data residency in Canada is the norm.

Our hackles were raised at this thought, dear readers, because we recently learned through the Investigative Journalism Foundation that Telus et al applied to the federal government for support for the Vancouver data centres, specifically asking for the government to commit to using a portion of the data centre’s capacity. The details of this request are as follows:

• Telus and their partners met with Prime Minister Carney on December 10th, 2025.
• The Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, was also there.
• The main point of this meeting was to make this request, as it is the only point in the summary notes.

This raises many questions, but the top of our personal list is this: if there is such a demand in Canada for sovereign AI compute, why would Telus need to beg the federal government to buy it?

We would like to posit a far more probable scenario. This is our opinion, of course, but we suspect it reflects reality far more than Telus’s press releases.

Telus has seen the scale of AI buildouts across the world, and it is aware of the rationale behind them: that there will be significant demand for AI compute, and the companies who do not build out to meet it will not make money. Whether this is accurate, of course, remains to be seen.

Telus would very much like to be able to make the billions that AI optimists predict are on the way for such companies. Thus, it commits funding and makes plans for data centres, specifically in Vancouver, but also in Kamloops and expanding Rimouski.

Telus is not entirely stupid, however. It is aware that demand for AI compute is rather nebulous and has not materialized as of yet. Rimouski is not sold out, after all. What if the demand doesn’t show up?

It turns to the federal government. Telus does many government projects and it already has connections there. It asks the government to commit to buying the compute in order to hedge its bet on AI. If the demand doesn’t show up, at least it will be able to recoup its costs with taxpayer money.

This, dear readers, should make you angry. It is not quite a grift, but it is utterly distasteful. It amounts to a government bailout of Telus’s bad business decisions, using our money to pay for costly, polluting data centres that we don’t want and didn’t ask for in our own communities. It is already galling to us that the government committed CAD$2 billion to this nonsense, and it is enraging that this is somehow not enough for Telus and their partners.

We will continue to watch, and wait. Our next objective is to view the sites themselves, in Mt Pleasant and in downtown Vancouver, and observe whether there has been any movement on the buildout.