Cohere and Aleph Alpha lock merger terms as compute race intensifies

TORONTO — Cohere and Germany’s Aleph Alpha have finalized and signed terms to combine into one company and are now seeking regulatory approval, CEO Aidan Gomez said, framing a joint Canadian–European champion that keeps the Cohere name with Gomez at the helm.

The April-announced deal brings Aleph Alpha’s regulated European government and private-sector client base and compliance know-how alongside Cohere’s models and North agent-builder platform, which customers can run on their own infrastructure so data stays under their control. Aleph Alpha co-CEO Ilhan Scheer is set to become COO of the combined firm. Financial terms were not disclosed; when the plan surfaced in April the combination was valued around US$20 billion.

Gomez said Cohere is scaling models “dramatically” to close a gap with OpenAI and Anthropic on coding and cybersecurity capabilities that matter for national security and economic defence — and that means locking down compute in Canada and Germany. Recent capacity includes a seven-megawatt Bell British Columbia deal via Buzz HPC valued at about US$220 million, StackIt capacity for European cloud needs, and 50 megawatts with Saudi Arabia’s Humain. “We’re feeling the pressure,” Gomez said. “We’re sprinting and trying to lock down compute as quickly as possible.”

Sovereign AI that still needs more GPUs is an inflation story about power, chips and capital: whoever controls the rack space sets the price of training the models that governments and banks say they must keep at home.