BUZZ HPC signs $220 million GPU deal with Bell and Cohere for Canadian sovereign AI

BUZZ High Performance Computing Inc. (BUZZ HPC), a subsidiary of HIVE Digital Technologies, has signed a three-year GPU cloud contract worth about US$220 million with Bell Canada and Cohere Inc., the company said on June 18. The companies describe the project as full-stack sovereign AI infrastructure built and operated entirely in Canada, under Canadian standards and aligned with the country's federal AI strategy.

The deal pairs a Canadian compute operator, a national telecom, and a domestic foundation-model lab at a moment when governments are pressing for AI capacity that stays within their borders. Under the contract, 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, interconnected with NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand, will be deployed at Bell's purpose-built facility in Merritt, British Columbia. Canadian original-equipment maker Hypertec is supplying the GPU servers. Deployment is expected from late 2026 into early 2027.

Cohere will run its foundation models and enterprise AI products on the BUZZ HPC cloud for government and enterprise customers. The arrangement gives Canadian organizations a domestic option for running models without sending data abroad, the company said.

HIVE is funding the GPU purchase with proceeds from a US$115 million convertible-note financing completed in April 2026. The company said the contract adds roughly $70 million in contracted annual recurring revenue to its current realized $35 million, pushing its contracted high-performance-computing revenue target above $100 million. Those figures are company projections rather than reported results. HIVE shares rose about 10 percent in pre-market trading on the day of the announcement.

Cohere has raised about US$1.6 billion from backers including AMD Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Oracle, and Cisco. Whether the Merritt build delivers on the sovereign-AI promise will depend on hitting the late-2026 deployment window and converting the contracted revenue the companies have projected.