May 13, 2026

Two new large-scale data centres are set to break ground in Vancouver this year.

There are 16 data centres already dotted around Vancouver, with a majority located in the downtown core and Mount Pleasant. They have various purposes, with some serving as colocation centers—where retail customers can rent equipment and bandwidth—and others purpose-built for AI.

The two new data centres coming to Vancouver, a joint project between telecommunications giant Telus and the federal government, are meant to improve and increase the scale of Canada’s sovereign AI infrastructure, Telus said Monday. The project was proposed under the federal government’s AI initiatives introduced in 2025 that support the development of these large-scale data centres.

These centres have been quietly popping up across Vancouver for a number of years, occupying hundreds of thousands of square feet in unassuming buildings. These tech towers have been storing cloud data and hosting website domains for over a decade in the city. Their existence is not necessarily benign, though.

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