. . .\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nick Frosst thinks there are only a handful of countries in the world at the frontier of the AI race. The United States. China. France, where Mistral holds the flag alone. And Canada, which has chosen Cohere as its global champion. You can count them all without using your thumb.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a wildly complicated engineering problem,\u201d said Frosst, one of Cohere\u2019s three co-founders, of the technical capacity required to build large language models from scratch. \u201cI think it\u2019s also downplayed. This is really, really challenging. And you\u2019ve seen massive companies spend huge amounts of money on it and just not\u2026\u201d He lets the sentence hang. The graveyard of failed attempts finishes it for him.<\/p>\n
The Toronto-based company doesn\u2019t make a consumer chatbot. What it builds are enterprise-grade language models designed to be deployed privately on a customer\u2019s infrastructure. Most of the genuinely useful data in the economy is regulated and sensitive\u2014the kind that drives decisions in financial services, telecom, or energy. The kind that can\u2019t be sent over the wire to a data centre in Virginia. \u201cLLMs are really only as useful as the data they have access to,\u201d Frosst said. \u201cMost of the real, useful data has regulations around it. It can\u2019t just be sent to some random data centre somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohere\u2019s answer is on-premise deployment and Model Vault, a walled-off set of GPUs running inside the customer\u2019s environment. CEO Aidan Gomez put it plainly at Davos: Cohere has no ability to observe data flowing through its models or shut them off. \u201cWe build it completely from scratch,\u201d he explained. \u201cWe have no external dependencies other than chips.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Protectionism in a nicer font\u2019<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s Command A models run on just two GPUs, hitting a sweet spot between performance and what enterprises actually have access to. Frosst said the company has spent \u201corders of magnitude less\u201d on training than some competitors. North, Cohere\u2019s agentic platform, wraps it all into a workspace where knowledge workers hand off the tedious parts of their day to a model running entirely within their employer\u2019s infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Sovereign AI\u2019 gets thrown around a lot, and it\u2019s easy to hear it as protectionism in a nicer font.\u201d Frosst resets the term by reaching for an analogy that\u2019s tied to, but distinct from, AI. \u201cI often compare this to energy sovereignty,\u201d he said. \u201cCanada is a pretty energy sovereign nation. Ontario generates roughly 55 percent of its power from nuclear. That\u2019s a sovereign capability. But we have to collaborate with other people to keep that running.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nuclear plants, wind turbines, and hydro all require international collaboration across everything from fuel to engineering to financing. But the finished product is sovereign: the lights stay on because of decisions made in Ontario, not because of the goodwill of a foreign government.<\/p>\n
The pitch lands differently when it comes from the customer rather than the vendor. Michel Richer, president of Bell AI (a key Cohere partner and customer), says Bell\u2019s understanding of data sovereignty has evolved dramatically over the past 14 months as the geopolitical landscape shifted. It now encompasses not just where data sits, but who controls the compute it runs on. \u201cWe want to ensure that no one from an external jurisdiction has access to the data, but also no one from an external jurisdiction can decide what runs and what doesn\u2019t,\u201d Richer said. Bell\u2019s CEO has a line for it: \u201cWe\u2019ll never put the off switch for Canada somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA necessary component of working at Cohere is that you can\u2019t think the technology is magic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nick Frosst, Cohere<\/p>\n
\u201cSovereignty doesn\u2019t mean isolation,\u201d Frosst said, crediting the line to AI minister Evan Solomon. \u201cWhen I talk about sovereignty, really what I mean is autonomy and agency \u2026 None of that means walling yourself off.\u201d A country doesn\u2019t build its own power grid because it hates its neighbours: it builds one because when the sun goes down, you want the light switch to be in your own building.<\/p>\n
The argument would be academic if nobody were buying. Gomez has said publicly that last year, Cohere\u2019s revenue was roughly 80 percent US-concentrated; by early 2026, that had dropped to less than half, even as the business overall more than doubled. The growth is coming from everywhere else.<\/p>\n
Bell signed its strategic partnership with Cohere in July 2025; nine weeks later, North was rolling out to Bell\u2019s management team, with more than 100 use cases already identified. The company\u2019s engineers are forward-deployed alongside Bell\u2019s teams, working on custom models; it\u2019s a capability Richer says most other LLM providers don\u2019t offer enterprise customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Europe, Cohere expanded its SAP partnership to deploy North on SAP\u2019s Sovereign Cloud. In Japan, Fujitsu built Takane, a custom Japanese-language model, on Cohere\u2019s platform. In South Korea, LG is doing the same in Korean. On the defence side, Cohere signed an MOU with Sweden\u2019s Saab to embed AI into GlobalEye surveillance jets, partnered with Thales Canada, and is working with both ThyssenKrupp and Hanwha Oceans, the two shortlisted bidders for Canada\u2019s next submarine fleet. By partnering with both, Cohere plays a role regardless of who wins the bid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gomez framed these target sectors (telco, financial services, energy, public sector) explicitly as national security concerns. The power grid, the communications grid, and every financial transaction are the load-bearing walls of the economy. And there\u2019s a reason a Canadian company is helping stand up those walls for so many international allies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Canadian flag is a good brand these days,\u201d Frosst said. \u201cPeople are excited to work with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohere gave its strongest signal yet of that geographic rebalancing act in late April, announcing plans to merge with Aleph Alpha, the German enterprise AI company, in a deal valuing the combined entity at around $20 billion USD. The deal has direct support from both the Canadian and German governments and a clear strategy: Cohere would absorb its smaller counterpart and fast-track its presence in Europe\u2019s largest economy and the EU as a whole.<\/p>\n
Not AGI but ROI<\/p>\n
Beyond its home country, Cohere is unique among global competitors in that its co-founders appear to believe something genuinely different about the technology. Frosst thinks OpenAI CEO Sam Altman\u2019s rhetoric about approaching AGI was \u201cacademically disingenuous\u201d and did \u201ca disservice\u201d to the field. His mantra is four words: not AGI but ROI. At a Vector Institute event this spring, he asked a room of AI researchers how many believed large language models posed an existential threat. Two hands went up. \u201cThey have fundamental limitations,\u201d Frosst said. \u201cI think those limitations are drastically underestimated.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not dismissing the technology; he\u2019s arguing it\u2019s being misapplied. Cohere trains its models on synthetic environments\u2014fake companies, fake emails, fake internal APIs\u2014all designed to teach a model how to be useful inside a business. \u201cWe\u2019re not training it to be an amazing conversationalist,\u201d he\u2019s said previously. Cohere customers don\u2019t ask the model to do abstract math reasoning; they ask it to file expenses and summarize contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA necessary component of working at Cohere is that you can\u2019t think the technology is magic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nick Frosst\u2019s first job was making burgers. He and his co-founders still go to McDonald\u2019s after every fundraising round, including the $500-million USD raise that brought Cohere\u2019s valuation to $6.8 billion. He orders two Junior Chickens. He fronts a Juno-nominated band called Good Kid; its debut album just dropped. These are not the biographical details of someone interested in building, or claiming to be building, a digital god.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are a product of Canada,\u201d Frosst said, and he meant it literally. \u201cI went to public school. I went to university. I\u2019ve had health care my whole life. We are a product of the government and the country that we grew up in. And so it\u2019s a deep honour to be able to help in any way we can.\u201d He pauses. \u201cWe build ourselves up by building each other up.\u201d<\/p>\n
A kid who grew up on Canadian public infrastructure is now trying to build his country\u2019s AI infrastructure and, in turn, help other nations do the same. The scarcity is real, the opportunity is real, and the flag on the door still matters.<\/p>\n
READ BETAKIT MOST AMBITIOUS 2026<\/p>\n
In the 21st century, there is no sovereignty without technology. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779797048_214_image1-1-1024x416.png\" "\\"Most")
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Meet the Canadian innovators strengthening our nation\u2019s autonomy, security, and prosperity in BetaKit Most Ambitious<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![\"BetaKit](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779797049_314_MA2026presentingsponsors.jpg\" "\\"BetaKit")
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