Three years after Nokia Canada announced plans to build a new campus in Ottawa, the first phase of the project has officially begun.
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Three years after Nokia Canada announced plans to build a new campus in Ottawa, the first phase of the project has officially begun.
In advance of a ground-breaking ceremony Tuesday morning, Nokia Canada president Jeffrey Maddox told OBJ on Monday that construction of the 750,000-square-foot development, which is being built in the Kanata North tech park at 570 March Rd., will now start.
With 1,900 R&D professionals employed by Nokia in Ottawa, Maddox said it’s a $340-million investment in both the company and the city.
“We’ve been operating here for almost 50 years, since the early ‘80s,” said Maddox. “We will have been operating in the country for longer than that. We’re already here. We appreciate the people who are here. We recognize the town.
“When we look at this business (as key to) the growth of what the company does for the next 50 years, there’s no question that you need to be invested in this market in order to compete on the global stage.”
The 11-acre site, which is situated between March Road and Legget Drive just south of Terry Fox Drive and Nokia’s existing facility at 600 March Rd., is currently occupied by a large surface parking lot.
Nokia’s plans call for an eight-storey “R&D engineering hub” with 225,000 square feet of office space on the northwest portion of the property. The engineering hub will focus on cybersecurity, 5G networks, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. It will be connected to a five-storey, 345,000-square-foot R&D laboratory that will front along Legget Drive to the east.
The buildings are also expected to include about 23,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space that will face a new private street connecting March Road and Legget Drive on the north side of the property.
A design brief from architecture firm Gensler says the retail component will initially contain dining and fitness facilities for Nokia employees, but is “designed to evolve into a lively retail corridor.”
Other elements of the project include a three-floor parking garage with space for 910 vehicles on the southwest side of the property, an outdoor amenity area and a large “mechanical work yard” south of the R&D lab that will store the large batteries used to power the building.
The plan for the campus was originally announced by Nokia Canada in 2022, with the company saying Ottawa was an ideal location to invest in as it expanded its presence in the Canadian market. Construction was originally slated to begin in 2023, with plans to open the new facility by 2026.
“Nokia is helping to drive Canada’s tech leadership,” Pekka Lunmark, former president and CEO of Nokia, said in a press release at the time. “This world-class, sustainable R&D hub will be one of Nokia’s most dynamic developments – and I’m proud that it will benefit the people of Ottawa also.”
Maddox said there are no “very good reasons” for the delay, just that the process took longer than expected. Work on phase one, he added, is expected to take about two-and-a-half years. He said the company hopes to have the new facility open by 2028.
“The vision remains intact from what we would have said previously,” said Maddox. “None of that has really changed. It just took us a little bit longer to sort through the process to get to the ground break.”
The new campus will support much of Nokia Canada’s work in the capital, Maddox said.
As part of Nokia’s growth strategy in a changing tech landscape, he said network infrastructure is becoming a cornerstone of the business. In addition to prioritizing quantum-safe networks, he said the company is focused on AI infrastructure, which will include developing a global fibre optics network, AI routers and connecting AI data centres as more are built.
“All of these things have development teams here in Ottawa,” he said. “This site is involved in all of the company’s most critical projects. The story we tell is about participating and leading the AI super-cycle. Much of that critical work has teams of R&D people doing that work on this campus.”
Maddox said another goal is to attract new talent to the area, with the next phase of the project intended to build out infrastructure to make Kanata North a more attractive place to live as well as work.
Once the first phase is complete, Nokia plans to tear down its current office tower at 600 March Rd., just north of the campus, and replace it with apartments. The company’s original proposal called for around 2,000 residential units at the site.
“People are the most important part of the equation,” said Maddox. “The subsequent phase will require us to identify an investor and a model to rebuild where we sit today into residential. The vision is simple, though — the notion of this live, work, play type of community. It’s really a grand vision and for us it’s trying to do our part in the community, to build the assets we need to attract talent and do our work.”
It’s a significant, long-term project that Maddox said he’s excited to see finally come to life.
“When you start these big projects, there will always be some number of people that are pessimists or not sure how we get there,” he said. “You can’t get to these types of days and not be super-excited. It takes an awful lot of work, far more than you think when you’re sitting there with a vision. It’s really a huge milestone for us to get to this point.”
When the plan was announced, the Finnish telecom giant said it wanted to transform Nokia Canada’s 26-acre campus at the Kanata North Business Park into a “sustainable, accessible mixed-use corporate, residential and commercial hub where nearly 2,160 local employees, Ottawa residents and businesses and Canada’s entire tech ecosystem can collaborate, innovate and drive Canadian and global well-being and prosperity.”
With files from David Sali
