In brief: Cohere retains a German headquarters after acquiring Aleph Alpha, with CEO Gomez diagnosing Europe’s competitive problem as lack of will rather than lack of resources.
Cohere is acquiring the Heidelberg AI startup Aleph Alpha and wants to preserve and expand its talent and German presence. The resulting company is intended to become one of the largest AI providers outside the USA.
Cohere, the Canadian AI company, is acquiring the Heidelberg startup Aleph Alpha. The two companies announced the transaction on 24 April, calling it a “transatlantic merger”. The combination would create one of the largest AI companies outside the United States, they said.
Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez made clear in a conversation with dpa at the tech conference in Heilbronn: Germany remains a second headquarters alongside the Canadian base. Aleph Alpha’s talent is to be retained in Germany and the country developed as a location. Gomez stressed that the company expects support from the Canadian and German governments — as two of the most important G7 players.
The combined company’s target audience is not private users but organisations in regulated sectors and critical infrastructure: finance, defence, energy, telecommunications and healthcare. Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU) commented on the planned merger as the emergence of a “global AI champion”.
Gomez diagnoses Europe’s lag in global AI competition not as a lack of talent, companies or capital, but as a lack of will and self-confidence. “There is simply the fear that we are not capable. And that is what holds us back,” he said. A cultural shift must take place — Europe needs the willpower to commit resources to projects and scale them.
Aleph Alpha was founded in Heidelberg in 2019 and was long considered one of Germany’s most significant AI companies. In the competition for large language models, however, the company could not keep pace with established providers such as ChatGPT, Google and Meta.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 1 June 2026
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