BCE Inc. joins 3 partners in AI infrastructure deal with Hive Digital

BCE Inc. is partnering with Cohere, Hypertec, and a former Bitcoin miner turned HPC provider to build sovereign AI infrastructure in Canada.

BCE Inc. partnered with Cohere, Hypertec, and BUZZ HPC — a unit of former Bitcoin miner Hive Digital Technologies — to combine Bell AI Fabric's data center infrastructure with enterprise-grade AI models, advancing Canada's sovereign AI push. The deal brings together four companies across connectivity, AI software, and high-performance computing.

"Bell AI Fabric's data center and connectivity foundation, combined with Cohere's secure enterprise AI solutions and BUZZ HPC's scalable accelerated computing infrastructure, enables critical research and development on AI models," the companies said in a joint announcement. The partnership builds on the Canadian Sovereign AI Alliance launched earlier this year.

BCE, Canada's largest communications company, provides telecommunications, internet, TV, and media services to millions of residential and business customers. The company's Bell AI Fabric unit serves as the connectivity and data center backbone for the partnership. Cohere, a Toronto-based AI company valued at more than $5 billion, brings its large language model capabilities and enterprise security focus. BUZZ HPC, spun out of Hive Digital Technologies — which previously operated Bitcoin mining infrastructure — contributes accelerated computing hardware optimized for AI workloads.

From Bitcoin Mining to AI Compute

The involvement of a former Bitcoin miner shows a growing trend of repurposing energy-intensive crypto mining infrastructure for AI workloads. Hive Digital, which rebranded from HIVE Blockchain Technologies in 2023, has been shifting its GPU fleet toward AI and HPC as the crypto mining industry faces margin compression. The company's BUZZ HPC unit now competes with dedicated cloud GPU providers for AI training and inference contracts. This pivot mirrors a broader industry pattern: CoreWeave, another former crypto miner, has become one of the largest providers of cloud GPU capacity, securing multi-billion dollar contracts with Microsoft and other hyperscalers.

For BCE, the deal represents a strategic push beyond traditional telecom services into the fast-growing AI infrastructure market. The company, whose stock yields more than 5% in dividends, is directing its data center assets to capture demand from enterprises seeking sovereign AI solutions — models trained and hosted within Canada's borders to comply with data residency requirements. Cohere's focus on enterprise security and data sovereignty aligns with this national infrastructure strategy.

The partnership comes as global AI infrastructure spending accelerates. Brookfield Asset Management and Bloom Energy recently expanded their AI power partnership to $25 billion, showing the scale of investment flowing into data center capacity. BCE's deal, while smaller in scope, targets a specific niche: sovereign AI for Canadian enterprises and government agencies that require data to remain within national borders. The Canadian government has been pushing for domestic AI infrastructure to reduce reliance on US-based cloud providers, creating a tailwind for companies like BCE and Cohere.

For investors, BCE is using the deal to diversify beyond its core telecom business, where revenue growth has been pressured by competition from Rogers Communications and Telus. BCE shares, yielding more than 5%, trade at a discount to US telecom peers as the market prices in domestic competitive pressures. The AI infrastructure push could open a new revenue stream, though the company did not disclose the financial terms of the partnership or its expected contribution to earnings.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.