Arrcus Announces Proof-of-Concept with TELUS to Accelerate Secure AI Using Arrcus Inference Network Fabric (AINF)

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Arrcus AINF delivers a secure, policy-aware networking fabric enabling real-time AI inferencing for TELUS across public safety, enterprise and government services in Canada

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SAN JOSE, Calif. — Arrcus, the leader in distributed networking infrastructure today announced that TELUS, one of Canada’s communications technology company, is working on a proof-of-concept (PoC) to explore using the Arrcus Inference Network Fabric (AINF) as its networking foundation for delivering sovereign, distributed AI inferencing at national scale. The PoC’s goal is to enable TELUS to bring secure, low-latency AI to mission-critical applications, from public safety and emergency response to enterprise and government services, while keeping sensitive data and workloads within Canadian borders.

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AI is undergoing a fundamental architectural shift. What began as centralized model training is rapidly evolving into a globally distributed inference paradigm, one where intelligence must be delivered closer to where data is generated and decisions must be made. For national operators like TELUS, this transformation creates both an imperative and an opportunity: to build the distributed AI infrastructure that the public sector, first responders, enterprises and citizens will depend on. At national scale this introduces complex new demands on networking that traditional, hardware-defined networking architectures were never designed to meet.

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Sovereign AI, the ability to develop, deploy and control AI infrastructure within national boundaries, has become a strategic priority for governments and regulated industries worldwide. For mission-critical applications such as public safety, emergency response coordination, real-time video analytics, and predictive threat detection, AI workloads must be delivered with ultra-low latency, deterministic performance and the confidence that sensitive data should not be crossing borders without authorization. TELUS is working on a PoC with Arrcus AINF – a networking fabric that can enforce sovereignty, optimize security, and make real-time distributed inferencing a deployable operational reality across its national network.

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“Public safety and mission-critical services demand AI that is fast, reliable and sovereign by design,” said Tim Fell, Vice-President Wireline Technology & Services, TELUS. “With AINF, Arrcus gives us the intelligent, policy-aware networking foundation to deliver AI inferencing at speed and scale across our network, with the data sovereignty, security, and predictability that our public safety partners, government customers and enterprise clients require.”

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“The era of centralized AI is giving way to distributed intelligence, and the network is becoming the control plane for performance, sovereignty and economics,” said Shekar Ayyar, Chairman and CEO of Arrcus. “TELUS is building the kind of trusted, national-scale AI infrastructure that Canada needs, and AINF is the networking fabric that can make this possible. AINF’s intelligent routing, real-time policy enforcement, and hardware-accelerated security enable TELUS to deliver mission-critical AI to the right place, with the right guarantees at the right time.”

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Arrcus AINF: Purpose-Built for Distributed, Sovereign AI Inferencing

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AINF is a purpose-built, AI policy-aware networking fabric that improves the delivery of inferencing applications across highly distributed networks. It functions as the intelligent control plane for distributed inference — dynamically evaluating operator-defined business policies such as latency targets, data sovereignty boundaries, model preference, and power constraints in real time, and steering inference traffic to the optimal node or cache accordingly. Unlike traditional networking solutions, AINF understands the nature of AI workloads: it is model-aware, intent-driven, and designed to enforce governance at the moment a prompt or request enters the network.

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Research indicates that intelligent, policy-aware networking can deliver over 60% reduction in Time to First Token (TTFT), 15% improvement in throughput (tokens per second), 40% reduction in end-to-end latency (E2EL) and up to 30% reduction in cost per inference – delivering measurable gains in responsiveness, efficiency and economics for every AI application*.

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At the core of the TELUS deployment, AINF integrates with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to deliver line-rate encryption ensuring that sovereign, multi-site inference traffic remains fully secure end-to-end without impacting performance. Combined with NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet switches, the solution creates a seamless inference fabric spanning edge, data center and cloud environments. AINF also works in concert with the NVIDIA Dynamo framework for site-local LLM load balancing, while managing global inference routing across TELUS’ distributed network, ensuring optimal utilization of compute resources at every level.

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Key AINF Capabilities for TELUS Network

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· Sovereign, Geo-Aware Routing: Enforcing geofencing and data sovereignty at ingress, supporting regulatory compliance and data residency within Canada
· AI Policy-Aware Routing: Dynamically directing inference to optimal sites based on models, policy, capacity and network conditions
· Mission-Critical Latency: Supporting real-time AI with up to 60% faster TTFT and 40% lower latency
· Line-Rate Security: Providing up to 400 Gb/s encryption with zero CPU overhead using NVIDIA BlueField DPUs
· Network Slicing & SLOs: Prioritizing critical workloads with operator-defined service levels for latency, throughput, power and cost
· Distributed Edge Intelligence: Enabling edge-based inference while routing complex workloads to centralized resources
· Open Integration: Integrating with NVIDIA Dynamo, vLLM, SGLang, Triton and Kubernetes for flexible, scalable deployment
· SRv6 & Mobile User Plane (MUP) Transport: Leveraging Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) and the Mobile User Plane (MUP) architecture for programmable, scalable transport of AI inference traffic across TELUS’ 5G and wireline network infrastructure
· Silicon Diversity: Supporting a broad ecosystem of merchant silicon and hardware platforms across the PoC, enabling TELUS to build a flexible, vendor-agnostic infrastructure that avoids lock-in and optimizes performance and cost across heterogeneous deployment environments