Startup will provide AI tools to Bell’s Canadian government and enterprise customers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cohere has struck a partnership with telecommunications giant Bell Canada to make use of Bell’s AI infrastructure and sell AI solutions to a suite of new Canadian clients.
Cohere’s large-language models (LLMs) and agentic AI platform North will be integrated into the AI services Bell provides to its Canadian customers, including governments, the companies announced. The telco said it will also deploy North within Bell, to allow employees to create and manage AI agents to perform tasks on their behalf.
Both organizations claim the partnership will allow Cohere to offer AI solutions while “maintaining security, privacy, and data residency in Canada.”
Toronto-based Cohere is Canada’s best-funded LLM developer and was valued at $5.5 billion USD (then $7.6 billion CAD) last year. Its AI products include an enterprise platform, which leverages AI agents to automate tasks. Cohere has inked partnerships with the Royal Bank of Canada, Dell Technologies, and Japanese software giant Fujitsu.
As part of the deal, Bell will become Cohere’s “preferred Canadian AI infrastructure provider” through its Bell AI Fabric project.
In May, Bell announced it would build six AI data centres in British Columbia that will run on hydroelectric power to meet a growing demand for AI compute in Canada. Now, clients of the Bell AI Fabric project will have access to Cohere’s LLMs and its workplace platform in addition to Bell’s data centre infrastructure and Ateko, its tech advisory services team.
Both organizations claim the partnership will allow Cohere to offer AI solutions while “maintaining security, privacy, and data residency in Canada,” as Cohere’s models will be trained and hosted on Canadian soil.
“This has the potential to be truly transformative for organizations looking to massively increase their productivity and efficiency without any compromise on data security and privacy,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a statement.
It’s currently unclear if any federal money is going towards Bell’s AI Fabric project, but the telco said in May that Bell is in talks with “multiple levels of the public sector” about access to compute infrastructure. BetaKit has reached out to Bell Canada and Cohere for comment.
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The federal government committed an initial investment of up to $240 million to Cohere to build a multi-billion-dollar AI data centre as part of its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, in partnership with United States (US) cloud computing company CoreWeave. A data centre operated by CoreWeave is reportedly set to open next month in Cambridge, Ont., with Cohere as a tenant.
The partnership with Bell, which provides IT services to multiple Canadian government customers, continues Cohere’s foray into the public sector. The startup recently inked a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government as part of the federal government’s broader efforts to deploy AI within the public service.
The news comes as a growing share of Canadian enterprises seek to host their data and software applications in Canada. Cohere’s Gomez has promoted the security features of his startup’s products online compared to US hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, which recently faced a cybersecurity breach affecting roughly 100 organizations that included the Québec government.
Feature image courtesy Cohere.