At the ALL IN conference in Montréal on Wednesday, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told Bloomberg AI reporter Rachel Metz that the Toronto-based AI company does not want to make its own chips, saying, “We don’t want to get into the space of building chips because there’s so much more we could do.” The stance runs against competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral, which this year began either exploring or moving forward on making their own chips. Gomez noted in a 2024 episode of the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast that Cohere maintains relationships with Nvidia and AMD to support customers’ desire to run AI models on a diverse set of platforms. Instead of building chips, Cohere hopes to become the world’s sovereign AI provider of choice. Gomez announced a business combination agreement with German peer Aleph Alpha, increasing 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.