The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that Telus will start operating AI data centres and sell access to Canadian companies that want to build and run artificial intelligence models, a market that is dominated by U.S. tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The Globe's Joe Castaldo and Irene Galea write that Telus is starting modestly by the standards of the AI world. The company is equipping a data centre it already owns in Rimouski, Que., with as many as 500 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia, which makes the in-demand chips tailored for training and running AI models. Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, are purchasing hundreds of thousands of GPUs. CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider preparing an initial public offering, has around 250,000. Operating this kind of infrastructure is complicated and expensive. Companies typically pay cloud service providers to access GPUs for AI rather than buying their own. Many Canadian companies already rely on U.S. tech players for these services. Telus's Hesham Fahmy said the company has ambitions to acquire tens of thousands of GPUs over several years, but expansion will be driven by customer demand. "We're ready to go as fast as Canada needs," he said.