MONTREAL \u2014 Canada\u2019s traditional telecom companies are jockeying for a piece of the federal government\u2019s push for \u201cdigital sovereignty\u201d in AI.<\/p>\n
Among the thousands of business executives and tech specialists attending the All In Conference in Montreal on Tuesday was Mirko Bibic, CEO of Bell Canada.<\/p>\n
Seated behind a Bell desk bracketed by booths representing tech firms, governments and research institutions, Bibic told The Canadian Press he was in Montreal to spread the word that his company is fully in the AI space.<\/p>\n
With a shifting \u201cgeopolitical environment,\u201d sovereignty is becoming \u201csuper critical,\u201d Bibic said.<\/p>\n
That includes digital sovereignty \u2014 a principle Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon defined in his opening keynote at the conference as a digital economy \u201cthat someone else can\u2019t decide to turn off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Digital sovereignty doesn\u2019t have an official definition but it often incorporates the idea of building digital infrastructure and storing data within a country.<\/p>\n
Bibic said he sees multiple components to digital sovereignty, including AI \u201ccompute\u201d \u2014 the technology that enables artificial intelligence systems to perform tasks \u2014 along with data storage, networking, trust and safety.<\/p>\n
When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the new Major Projects Office to oversee the fast-tracking of nation-building projects, he included building a \u201csovereign cloud\u201d on its to-do list.<\/p>\n
A sovereign cloud is a computing environment companies use to run services which can be set up to comply with a specific country\u2019s laws or core values.<\/p>\n
The \u201cCanadian tech ecosystem\u201d needs to be at the centre of Ottawa\u2019s digital sovereignty strategy, Bibic said.<\/p>\n
That includes all elements of that ecosystem, he said, including \u201clarge companies like Bell that are sovereign by definition, sovereign in history and have always been kind of part of Canada\u2019s economic fabric.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bell announced in May its AI Fabric project, which will see the company open six artificial intelligence data centres in B.C. as part of a plan to create the largest AI compute project in Canada.<\/p>\n
In July, Bell announced a partnership with artificial intelligence company Cohere to provide end-to-end sovereign AI solutions for government and enterprise customers across Canada. Cohere is making its AI services available through Bell AI Fabric, while Bell is incorporating North, Cohere\u2019s agentic AI platform (an autonomous AI system that makes proactive decisions) into AI Fabric.<\/p>\n
Bibic said that when Bell first announced the AI Fabric project, Solomon encouraged the company to get involved with the Canadian tech ecosystem and put him and Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez in touch.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that sparked a dialogue between the two of us and our executive teams, which ultimately led pretty quickly\u201d to the partnership, Bibic said.<\/p>\n
Bell wasn\u2019t the only telco \u2014 a telecom company that got its start in traditional wired telephone infrastructure \u2014 with a booth at the AI conference.<\/p>\n
On the second day of the conference, Telus announced what it called in a press release Canada\u2019s first fully sovereign AI Factory.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a facility that offers AI compute to others who want to use it, said Jaime Tatis, senior vice-president and chief AI officer at TELUS. He said it\u2019s an extension of what his company has been doing for decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think about wireless networks, it was cable before, fibre now \u2026 it\u2019s the continuation of how we build technical infrastructure for the country,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Tatis said sovereignty was always going to be a \u201ccritical ingredient\u201d of his company\u2019s work in AI. but the changing geopolitical environment put it on \u201cthe radar much quicker than anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bibic said he\u2019s been \u201cpretty encouraged\u201d by Carney\u2019s approach to telecom, broadcasting and digital policy, including artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see a government that wants to seize the moment, which means \u2026 having the right vision and moving fast,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so far, so good.\u201d<\/p>\n
The AI conference closed with a speech by the minister traditionally responsible for the telecom file.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that old alliances that we used to take for granted don\u2019t necessarily work anymore,\u201d Industry Minister M\u00e9lanie Joly told the audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, new alliances are being formed and we need to make sure that national economic strength becomes once more a priority.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s where you come in, because we need economic growth. And AI is all about economic growth. We need to make sure that while there\u2019s still a lot of unpredictability and that will be our reality, we can continue to work together on what we can control.\u201d<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n
With files from Sammy Hudes<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2025.<\/p>\n
CTV News and BNN Bloomberg are owned by Bell Media, which is a division of BCE.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MONTREAL \u2014 Canada\u2019s traditional telecom companies are jockeying for a piece of the federal government\u2019s push for \u201cdigital…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,45,49,48,295,47,714,66,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-171675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-environment","15":"tag-national","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-science","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}