By Elke Porter | WBN News Vancouver | July 16, 2026
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Data Centres Are Here to Stay

Telus is moving ahead with plans for a three-site network of AI data centres in British Columbia, a project the telecom giant says will anchor Canada's "sovereign" AI infrastructure while pumping billions into the provincial economy.

Where They Will Be

The cluster spans two cities. In Kamloops, Telus is expanding its existing data centre, which is already operating and will come fully online later this year. In Vancouver, two brand-new facilities are planned with developer Westbank. The first, known as M3, will occupy a converted six-storey former Hootsuite office building at 111 East 5th Avenue in Mount Pleasant. The second and largest, at 150 West Georgia Street downtown near BC Place, will be a purpose-built 400,000-square-foot facility capable of drawing up to 100 megawatts of power.

What It Means for Vancouver

Beyond computing capacity, Telus is framing the project as a heating solution. The Mount Pleasant site is designed to connect into the City of Vancouver's Neighbourhood Energy Utility, while the downtown facility will sit atop Creative Energy's district steam plant, feeding it waste heat and cutting the steam plant's own energy demand. Telus estimates the recovered heat from the two Vancouver sites could warm the equivalent of 150,000 homes. The company also points to roughly 525 permanent jobs and about $9 billion in projected economic activity tied to the cluster.

Water Usage

Data centre water use has become a flashpoint in communities weighing these projects, and Telus says its approach is different. Rather than the evaporative cooling common at conventional facilities, the Vancouver sites will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system that recirculates coolant rather than consuming it. Telus estimates this cuts water use by roughly 90 percent compared to a traditional data centre of similar size, saving an estimated 300 million litres a year at full scale, with annual consumption projected at just over 33 million litres. The downtown site's design also incorporates recycled water from BC Place Stadium.

Timeline and Why It Matters

The Kamloops expansion is expected online later in 2026. M3 in Mount Pleasant is slated to open by the end of 2026 and scale through 2028. The downtown Georgia Street tower, the largest of the three, is expected to launch in 2029. Combined, the cluster is projected to scale to more than 60,000 GPUs and over 150 megawatts of capacity by 2032 — part of a federal push to keep Canadian AI data and computing power on Canadian soil rather than relying on foreign-owned infrastructure.

TAGS: #TelusDataCentre #VancouverTech #SovereignAI #AIInfrastructure #BCTech #MountPleasant #SustainableAI #CanadianAI