Cohere and Aleph Alpha have signed a definitive business combination agreement, formalizing the transatlantic tie-up first announced in April and creating what will operate globally as Cohere at a reported combined valuation of roughly $20 billion. The two companies announced the definitive deal on September 16, 2026, subject to regulatory approvals expected to close later in 2026.
A transatlantic sovereign-AI champion
The combined company will run with dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, with Aleph Alpha's Heidelberg office turning into a dedicated AI research center. Headcount is expected to exceed 1,000 across the two continents. Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez remains CEO. Aleph Alpha co-CEO Ilhan Scheer becomes Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Samuel Weinbach takes the newly created Chief Research Officer role.
"No government or enterprise should have to choose between capable AI and control over their technology," Gomez said in a statement accompanying the announcement. Scheer added that Aleph Alpha has "sharpened our focus on specialized language models for governments and regulated industries" over the past year.
Cash, cloud and customers behind the deal
The combined group is backed by heavyweight strategic capital. Germany's Schwarz Group — parent of the Lidl and Kaufland retailers and of the STACKIT cloud unit — is committing about €500 million (~$573 million), extending the €11 billion data-center build-out STACKIT has planned around a 100,000-GPU fleet. Canadian government-backed investors are reported to be adding roughly $3 billion behind Cohere's sovereign-AI positioning in North America.
Product-wise, Cohere brings its Command LLM series, the Parse document-processing stack and the North productivity service. Aleph Alpha adds compact language models, custom evaluation benchmarks and inference optimization tooling that the company has pitched hard to European public-sector buyers.
Second wave of sovereign AI M&A
The definitive signing turns a widely-anticipated June announcement of terms into a binding deal, and sits alongside a run of European and Canadian moves — from hyperscaler-scale AI infrastructure deals to fresh state-backed research funding for LawZero — as governments try to lock in domestic AI stacks. Cohere's 2025 revenue was roughly $240 million on a September 2025 valuation of $7 billion; Aleph Alpha had previously raised around $126 million.
Reporting based on coverage from SiliconANGLE, Cohere, Reuters and IndexBox.