HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd. has contracted a fibre optic network overbuild and upgrade at its Grand Falls Data Centre in New Brunswick through its BUZZ High Performance Computing subsidiary, marking a significant step toward a Tier III HPC-enabled facility. The project represents a roughly $3.1 million capital commitment over five years, with funding drawn from HIVE’s recent $115 million 0% exchangeable note issuance to support GPU AI and Tier III HPC data center growth. Grand Falls is already energized at 70 MW gross load, and BUZZ is converting the site into a 50 MW Tier III+ AI factory intended for enterprise, government, and sovereign AI workloads.
Strategic upgrade at Grand Falls and its role in HIVE’s growth plan
The fiber overbuild and carrier transport upgrade at Grand Falls are designed to upgrade the campus to a sovereign AI infrastructure hub. BUZZ is partnering with a Canadian carrier to install dedicated high-capacity optical wavelength services, consisting of multiple 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps connections. The fibre project represents a foundational element in HIVE’s strategy to scale its GPU AI cloud offerings while expanding its sovereign AI capabilities in Canada.
HIVE notes that Grand Falls currently operates with 70 MW of powered infrastructure, and BUZZ intends to convert the facility into a 50 MW Tier III+ AI factory. The initiative aligns with the company’s broader aim to build out Canada’s AI infrastructure with a focus on data sovereignty and secure workloads hosted on Canadian soil. The Canadian partner’s involvement indicates a substantial capital expenditure beyond HIVE’s own funding, underscoring the scale of the upgrade and the emphasis on high-throughput, reliable connectivity.
Fiber network, capacity, and collaboration with a Canadian carrier
In collaboration with a major Canadian carrier, BUZZ is upgrading Grand Falls with dedicated high-capacity optical wavelength services. The upgrade includes the deployment of multiple 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps connections intended to support AI workloads at scale. This partnership is presented as a key element in enabling the kind of enterprise, government, and sovereign AI workloads that BUZZ aims to host at the Grand Falls campus.
The project emphasizes a tightly coordinated integration of power, bandwidth, and computing capacity. HIVE’s leadership describes the fiber expansion as a critical “superhighway” for moving intelligence to customers, with the broader objective of combining power, fibre, and GPUs to establish a Canadian AI infrastructure footprint. The arrangement with the carrier is described as exclusive in terms of dedicated network capacity to Grand Falls, reinforcing the strategic importance of this site within HIVE and BUZZ’s sovereign AI roadmap.
Leadership perspectives on Canada’s sovereign AI ambitions
“AI is the new industrial race. Countries that build sovereign AI factories will raise their productivity and security through data sovereignty, ensuring data doesn’t leave the countries borders, providing those nations greater data IQ. Countries that do not have their own sovereign AI infrastructure will depend on foreign infrastructure and thus rent intelligence from others.”
Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of HIVE and BUZZ, articulated a vision tying the fibre upgrade to national AI sovereignty and data security. He emphasized that the integration of fiber, power, and GPU compute creates a pathway to local, sovereign AI capabilities while enabling the company to capitalize on what he described as the AI token economy—converting power into local AI tokens of intelligence.
Aydin Kilic, President and CEO of HIVE, underscored connectivity as a prerequisite for AI factory development. He noted that exclusive, dedicated network capacity at Grand Falls is essential to serve enterprise and sovereign AI customers with the redundancy and throughput demanded by the AI market. Kilic also highlighted that HIVE’s GPU AI cloud offering is expanding—doubling in size from 5,500 GPUs to 11,000 GPUs—while advancing BUZZ’s HPC data center expansion to accelerate growth.
Craig Tavares, President and COO of BUZZ, described Grand Falls as a sovereign AI initiative for Canada—Canadian-owned, Canadian-operated, secure, scalable, and designed for sensitive workloads on Canadian soil. He pointed to the 70 MW of powered infrastructure, a 32-acre expansion path, and the Tier III design underway, along with dedicated optical fibre capacity, as foundational elements in bringing one of Canada’s largest sovereign AI campuses to market.
About HIVE Digital Technologies and BUZZ
Founded in 2017, HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd. is the first publicly listed company to mine digital assets powered by green energy. The company builds and operates next-generation Tier I and Tier III data centers across Canada, Sweden, and Paraguay, serving Bitcoin and high-performance computing clients. HIVE combines infrastructure-driven hash rate services with GPU-accelerated AI computing to deliver scalable, environmentally responsible solutions for the digital economy.
BUZZ High Performance Computing (BUZZ) is a wholly owned subsidiary of HIVE (TSXV: HIVE) and an NVIDIA Cloud Partner. BUZZ provides enterprise-grade cloud services and large-scale GPU clusters in vertically integrated data centers, with a focus on sovereign AI platforms across multiple time zones and continents. The platform supports Kubernetes, Slurm, virtual machines, and bare-metal deployments optimized for AI, machine learning, and scientific workloads, with a commitment to renewable energy and ultra-low Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) below 1.3. BUZZ operates in Canada and internationally, delivering a suite of AI-focused services and hardware for model training, fine-tuning, and inference.
For more information, visit hivedigitaltechnologies.com/investors/ and BUZZ’s information hub at buzzhpc.ai. Corporate updates and investor communications are available through the company’s social channels as listed in the press materials.
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