18.55 riverfront acres. An 1870 heritage mill turned Canadian AI data centre. Robotics labs, smaller and more affordable smart homes, a 24-hour flagship library, a world-class wellness and longevity centre, a venture studio, vertical gardens and urban farms, and a waterfront civic plaza threaded with water features. Five minutes to Highway 401, walking distance to the future ION LRT extension, and an existing pedestrian bridge straight to Riverside Park. The leading edge of Canadian AI, built into a real place where people live, work, gather, grow, and stay well.
SPUR Smart Village is a master-planned community on the site of a 1870 brick-and-beam woollen mill at the edge of Cambridge's Hespeler core. One place, nine pillars. AI infrastructure, robotics and maker labs, smaller and more affordable live-work homes, a world-class 24-hour library and learning commons, a working venture studio, a wellness and longevity centre, vertical gardens and urban farms, a public civic square on the river threaded with water features, and a closed-loop energy system where the data centre heats the village and the waterfalls cool the compute. Walking distance to the future LRT, five minutes to the 401, direct frontage on the Speed River with an existing pedestrian bridge straight into Riverside Park.
NVIDIA Blackwell-class data centre inside the heritage mill. Canadian on-soil, tier-grade build, engineered to SOC 2 / ISO 27001.
High-bay robotics and hardware labs in converted mill bays. Hardware-in-the-loop space, prototyping shop, integration cells.
A smaller-unit, more-affordable mix across townhouses, mid-rise, and two riverside towers. AI-aware utilities, in-suite compute, fibre-to-the-unit, and an unusually generous wrap of shared community spaces designed for collaboration, health, and innovation.
A civic-scale public library built to world-class standards. Open all 24 hours. Silent reading halls, an immersive learning theatre, kids' and teens' zones, podcast and broadcast studios, a makerspace, and a 24/7 cafe. SPUR Learn's free AI curriculum runs out of it.
SPUR's full studio engine on site. Scholarships, capital pathways, a pitch theatre, and an ecosystem of mentors and operators.
A real public realm. Waterfront civic plaza, paddle launch, rock climbing, pickleball / padel courts, brewery, restaurants. The existing pedestrian bridge already links the site straight into Riverside Park.
A world-class wellness and longevity centre at the heart of the village. Fitness, recovery, preventative medicine, and mental-health services that promote physical and mental wellness across every life stage.
The village breathes. Vertical gardens climb the buildings, rooftop and ground-level urban farms grow food for residents and restaurants, and water features thread the public realm for cooling, calm, and play.
A closed-loop village. Waste heat from the AI data centre warms homes, greenhouses, and wellness pools. River-fed waterfalls and water features cool the compute hall and the public realm. Solar canopies, battery storage, and a district microgrid run the rest.
Full build-out across ~2.0 million square feet of mixed-use, 12 buildings, three phases. Numbers from the revised site strategy.
A flagship public library and learning commons built to world-class standards. Civic anchor, not an amenity. Free, public, and never closed.
A world-class fitness and movement centre at the heart of the village - strength, cardio, studios, climbing, and an aquatic centre, free to residents and open long hours.
Selected renders from the SPUR Smart Village design pack. River frontage, heritage mill conversion, civic plaza, residences, and the Canadian compute hall inside the mill.
This is not a concept. SPUR already runs the model the village is built on: an AI data centre and GPU cloud serving paying customers inside an innovation campus, hosted in Canada.
SPUR's Waterloo campus is the former BlackBerry headquarters: four buildings on 37.6 acres with data-centre power and backup generation, a live GPU cloud, SPUR's own software and assistants, and the venture studio and education programmes working next to the compute. The Smart Village brings that operating playbook to a heritage site on the river and adds the neighbourhood around it.
A data centre that pays for a public library, warms the homes next to it, and opens the riverfront. The civic programme is the point, not a trade-off.
100,000+ volumes on opening, studios, a makerspace and a 4K learning theatre inside the mill. Open every hour of every day, with free AI courses from SPUR Learn.
Studios to family homes, all rental, designed around lower carrying costs and shared kitchens, lounges and rooftop gardens on every block.
A public civic plaza, paddle launch, courts, restaurants and a brewery on the Speed River, joined to Riverside Park by the existing pedestrian bridge.
Warmth from the data hall is piped to homes, greenhouses and the wellness pools. Water features and the river cool the compute. Engineered to net-zero operational carbon, and silent from outside: SPUR's insulated halls make no noise beyond their walls, as the Waterloo campus shows today.
Greenhouses, rooftop farms and community plots feed the village's restaurants and pantry, with kids' growing programmes year round.
Robotics labs, the venture studio and the data hall put technical work and new companies in the core, next to a wellness centre open to the public.
Built in three deliberate phases so the village comes alive year by year. Each phase stands on its own and adds capacity for the next.
Heritage mill restoration, first data hall fit-out, robotics + makers labs, venture studio, 24-hour library and learning commons, wellness and longevity centre, first vertical gardens and rooftop farm, village square with water features and cooling waterfalls, district microgrid and heat-recovery loop from the data centre, restaurants and brewery, first affordable smart-home blocks fronting the river. The existing pedestrian bridge already connects the site to Riverside Park.
Two riverside residential towers (Buildings 9 + 10, 25 and 22 storeys). Expanded innovation floors. Civic programming reaches steady state. Pickleball / padel, climbing, paddle launch open to the public.
Final affordable smart-home blocks on the park edge. Vertical gardens, urban farms, and water features at full extent across the village. Full village population resident; transit and walking links to the broader Hespeler community fully built; the existing Riverside Park bridge anchors a continuous public realm from mill to park.
The site has been a SPUR-owned, SPUR-operated data centre site since 2023. Existing fabric, power, and security already meet the Canadian compute standard. The village builds out from a real, working core.
Both, deliberately. The data centre occupies the heritage mill and is the economic engine. Around it are 2,000 homes, a public library, a wellness centre, restaurants, a market, greenhouses and a riverfront plaza across about 2 million square feet. The compute is roughly 360,000 square feet of innovation space in total; the rest is for people.
The site already has almost 10 MW of power. The full plan is a 50 MW data centre, which needs a new feed and substation from GrandBridge Energy, built in step with the phases. The village is designed as a closed loop: a district microgrid with solar canopies and battery storage, and the data hall's waste heat reused across the site instead of rejected.
No. SPUR's data centres are fully insulated and nothing is heard outside the building. The proof is the Waterloo campus, where a live GPU hall runs today beside offices, a wellness centre and neighbours and is silent from outside. The village hall sits inside the brick mill with the same construction, and the design rejects heat through the water features and the river rather than banks of rooftop fans.
It stays. The brick-and-beam bays, with 42-foot clear heights, become the data hall, the library and the robotics labs. Retaining the mill is the heritage anchor of the whole plan.
By building more, smaller homes with lower carrying costs: studios, micro and one-bedroom units alongside family homes, with generous shared spaces so a smaller suite still gives a full life. All homes are rental; nothing in the village is sold.
Three phases. Phase 1 brings the mill to life: data centre, labs, venture studio, library and the first public realm. Phase 2 adds the first residential blocks, food and retail, the wellness centre and greenhouses. Phase 3 completes the riverside towers and remaining homes. Timing depends on the City of Cambridge approvals process; the site is designated a Regeneration Area, which supports the mixed-use re-designation.
Use the form below to book a meeting or a site visit. Investors can request the investment overview; community groups, prospective tenants and founders are welcome too.
