Cohere and Aleph Alpha have announced plans to join forces in a transatlantic alliance aimed at providing an independent, enterprise-grade sovereign AI alternative. The planned deal would combine Cohere’s global AI scale with Aleph Alpha’s research capabilities and institutional relationships in Europe. The partnership is designed to serve highly regulated sectors, including the public sector, finance, defense, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications, and healthcare.
The alliance comes as demand grows for AI systems that give enterprises and governments more control over data, infrastructure, and regulatory compliance. Cohere cited a March 2026 McKinsey report projecting the AI services market to surpass $1 trillion annually, with sovereign AI needs representing nearly $600 billion of that total. Aidan Gomez, Cohere’s Co-Founder and CEO, said organizations are demanding “uncompromising control over their AI stack” as they move from experimentation to secure implementation.
As part of the partnership, the combined entity would work with companies of Schwarz Group to deploy a sovereign AI offering on STACKIT, the cloud infrastructure of Schwarz Digits. Schwarz Group also intends to back Cohere’s upcoming Series E funding round as lead investor with a $600 million structured financing commitment. Aleph Alpha Co-CEO Ilhan Scheer said the alliance creates a “real counterweight” for organizations that do not want to outsource control of AI to a single provider or jurisdiction.