Cohere and Aleph Alpha agree to combine, forming a transatlantic sovereign AI company
Cohere and Aleph Alpha announced a business combination agreement to operate globally as a single company under the Cohere name, dual-headquartered in Toronto and Berlin with a research center retained in Heidelberg.
What's new
Under the agreement, Aleph Alpha's leadership joins Cohere's executive team: Aleph Alpha co-CEO Ilhan Scheer becomes Chief Operating Officer and co-Chief Research Officer Samuel Weinbach becomes Chief Research Officer, while Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez remains CEO. The combined company will employ more than 1,000 people across North America and Europe.
- Dual headquarters in Toronto, Canada and Berlin, Germany
- Heidelberg retained as a research center
- Combined workforce exceeds 1,000
- Cohere brings enterprise deployment and existing public-sector partnerships across North America and Europe; Aleph Alpha brings language models built for governments and regulated industries, plus research in tokenization, training, explainability, and image generation
"No government or enterprise should have to choose between capable AI and control over their technology. That belief is exactly why we're joining forces with Aleph Alpha," said Aidan Gomez, Cohere's CEO.
Context
Both companies have spent 2026 positioning themselves around "sovereign AI" — infrastructure and models governments and regulated industries can run without depending on US hyperscalers. Cohere has been stacking enterprise and government partnerships (its recent OpenText tie-up among them); Aleph Alpha, a German lab, has focused narrowly on regulated-industry and government deployments in Europe. Schwarz Digits, the German conglomerate tied to Schwarz Gruppe, is also involved in the deal as a strategic partner.
Why it matters
This combination pitches itself explicitly as "the first foundational model developer anchored on both sides of the Atlantic," aligned with Canadian and German sovereignty requirements — a direct answer to European and Canadian government customers wary of relying on US-based frontier labs for sensitive AI workloads. For an AI industry consolidating around a small number of frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI) plus a long tail of open-weight players, a merger of two mid-sized Western labs is a notable bet that scale and government trust, not just raw model capability, will decide who wins in regulated markets.
Corroborating sources
- Cohere
https://cohere.com/blog/cohere-and-aleph-alpha-sign-agreement
“No government or enterprise should have to choose between capable AI and control over their technology. That belief is exactly why we're joining forces with Aleph Alpha”