The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that Bell Canada parent BCE is expanding its Merritt, B.C., data centre in collaboration with Toronto's Cohere, as Canada aims to reduce reliance on U.S. artificial-intelligence infrastructure. The Globe's Irene Galea writes that construction is under way on the data centre expansion, which is expected to double its 6.5-megawatt capacity by early 2027 for large language model developer Cohere, through an infrastructure deal with two other companies. The telco is betting on AI as a major growth vector for its business, investing in data centres as well as cybersecurity and consulting arms. In March, Bell said it is aiming to generate $2-billion in revenue from its AI services by 2028. The company has plans to monetize 373 megawatts of power before that point, with ambitions of expanding to 800 megawatts in the future. The Merritt development addresses the lack of sovereign AI compute capabilities, a gap identified by Ottawa in the government's new AI strategy. The impact of that dependance was highlighted last week when the U.S. government directed Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from accessing its most capable artificial intelligence models, Fable and Mythos.