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(Bloomberg) — Artificial intelligence startup Cohere Inc. is partnering with CoreWeave Inc. to build a multibillion-dollar data center in Canada, with financial help from the Canadian government.
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The company, headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, is among the largest startups in Canada with a valuation of over $5.5 billion and about 400 employees.
The location of the new AI data center, to be built by CoreWeave, has yet to be officially determined. No financial details were released. Cohere is expected to provide a significant investment in the project as it seeks to train its models and secure computing power in Canada. The site will also provide enough capacity for other players.
The government will support Cohere for as much as C$240 million ($170 million) as part of its C$2 billion Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.
“Canadian champions drawing in billions of dollars in investment to build infrastructure is a home run when it comes to putting policy in action,” Francois-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s innovation minister, said in a statement.
Cohere, founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, has raised $970 million from a pool of investors that includes Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Public Sector Pension Investment Board and Montreal-based investment firm Inovia Capital.
Its technology started by using large language models to generate text from prompts, but customized for businesses. In a letter to employees and investors Thursday, Gomez said the firm is now seeking to build more tailored and secured models as companies struggle to find ways to use generative AI.
At the end of March, Cohere was generating $35 million in annualized revenue, up from $13 million at the end of 2023, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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