Canada’s AI champion isn’t looking to become a chip champion any time soon. The news: In a conversation with Bloomberg AI reporter Rachel Metz at the ALL IN conference in Montréal on Wednesday, Aidan Gomez, CEO of Toronto-based AI developer Cohere, said the company doesn’t want to make its own chips.
From the source: “We don’t want to get into the space of building chips because there’s so much more we could do,” Gomez said.
The context: As usual, Cohere is running against the grain compared to its competitors. This year, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and even Cohere’s non-US counterpart Mistral began either exploring or moving forward on making their own chips.
When an AI company designs its own semiconductors, it can optimize the hardware to run its models more efficiently within data centres. This can make AI inquiries cheaper to run, and help diversify away from huge chip providers like Nvidia, which dominate the increasingly expensive AI chip market.
Cohere does maintain relationships with Nvidia and AMD, Gomez noted in a 2024 episode of the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast, where he explained that Cohere needs to support its customers’ desire to run their AI models on a diverse set of platforms.
Final thought: Instead of building chips, Cohere hopes to become the world’s sovereign AI provider of choice. This week, Gomez announced that his company came to terms on a business combination agreement with German peer Aleph Alpha. The acquisition will increase Cohere’s employee headcount to more than 1,000 across Canada and Europe as it attempts to take on AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. The deal comes as Cohere is reportedly nearing a Series E fundraising between $2 billion and $3 billion USD.
With files from Madison McLauchlan.
Feature image courtesy ALL IN. Photo by Melanie Olmstead Photographe.