A new alliance between Canada’s leading artificial intelligence startup and one of its major telecommunications firms is aiming to sell made-in-Canada AI tools to Canadian governments and businesses amid a wider national push to build out the country’s sovereign AI capabilities.
On Wednesday morning, Cohere Inc. and BCE Inc. announced a partnership that will make the startup’s AI offerings, including its large language models and agentic AI platform, available through Bell Canada’s AI data centres and fibre network.
Cohere co-founder and chief executive Aidan Gomez said the project would help organizations “increase their productivity and efficiency without any compromise on data security and privacy.”
This May, Bell Canada launched a data centre initiative called the Bell AI Fabric, a national network of AI-focused data centres that will start with a “supercluster” in British Columbia.
Canada is one of many countries pursuing a “sovereign AI” strategy that emphasizes the use of homegrown resources in order to protect national economic and security interests as the technology becomes a new front line in global economic competition.
Both Cohere and Bell Canada have talked up their abilities to provide secure and sovereign AI solutions as a selling point.
Cohere, for its part, has made major efforts to shore up its position as the country’s top homegrown AI provider. The deal with Bell adds another big business to a Canadian client list that includes the Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank.
The company has lobbied Ottawa policymakers on AI rules and regulations as it pushes to secure government contracts. Last month, it inked an agreement with the Carney government to implement its AI tools for government operations and to advance AI safety research with national organizations such as the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).
Cohere will also receive up to $240 million to build and access AI compute from Ottawa’s Sovereign AI Compute Strategy — a plan hatched by the former Trudeau government to build more domestic computing capacity. Cohere has teamed up with New Jersey cloud computing provider CoreWeave to launch a new data centre in Cambridge, Ont., this year.
Founded in 2019, Cohere built up its business by serving U.S. and global customers such as Oracle Corp., Dell Technologies Inc., SAP SE, and Fujitsu Limited. It signed a deal in June with Virginia-based software firm Second Front Systems to offer national security-focused AI services for the U.S. government and has also grown its Asia footprint through the launch of a new office in South Korea in July.
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