HIVE Digital Technologies (TSX-V:HIVE, NASDAQ:HIVE) announced that its subsidiary BUZZ High Performance Computing (BUZZ HPC) has entered into a preferred partnership with Bell Canada to provide large-scale sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure through Bell AI Fabric.
Under the agreement, BUZZ HPC will supply Bell’s government and enterprise clients with access to NVIDIA Ampere, Hopper, and Blackwell GPU clusters connected through NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
The infrastructure will be integrated with Bell AI Fabric’s fibre network, data centres, and partner ecosystem, which includes Canadian AI company Cohere.
According to the company, the collaboration will support AI development and model training within Canada, including foundational models and fine-tuning applications.
The deployments will comply with Canadian data residency and cybersecurity regulations by hosting the infrastructure in Canadian-owned facilities, it added.
The initial rollout will begin later this year with a 5-megawatt deployment in Manitoba, followed by expansions into additional Bell AI Fabric data centres across the country. The project is designed to ensure nationwide access to high-performance computing resources.
“Sovereign is the new standard for cloud computing, and this partnership with Bell marks the beginning of a new era for AI innovation in Canada," BUZZ HPC executive chairman Frank Holmes said in a statement.
"With NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure deployed domestically and a global footprint serving international customers, we are uniquely positioned to help Canada lead in AI while protecting its digital independence.”
John Watson, Group President, Business Markets, AI and Ateko at Bell, highlighted that BUZZ HPC is one of the few Canadian cloud service providers with a purpose-built AI cloud and experience operating GPU clusters at scale.
“We are excited to partner with BUZZ HPC for its AI infrastructure solutions – an important layer in the Bell AI Fabric ecosystem delivering the advanced workloads our customers need in a sovereign, private and secure Canadian facility,” Watson said.
Shares of HIVE gained 1.5% in Tuesday morning trading in New York at $2.41.