Artificial intelligence startup Cohere has partnered with telecommunications giant Bell Canada to utilize Bell’s AI infrastructure and offer AI solutions to new Canadian clients. Cohere’s large-language models (LLMs) and the AI platform North will be incorporated into Bell’s AI services for Canadian customers, including government entities. Bell will also implement North internally to enable employees to create and manage AI agents for task execution.
Both companies state the partnership facilitates AI solutions while ensuring security, privacy, and data residency in Canada. Based in Toronto, Cohere is Canada’s leading LLM developer, valued at $5.5 billion USD last year. The company offers an enterprise platform that uses AI agents to automate tasks and has alliances with the Royal Bank of Canada, Dell Technologies, and Fujitsu.
Bell will become Cohere’s preferred Canadian AI infrastructure provider under its Bell AI Fabric project, part of which includes constructing six AI data centers in British Columbia to respond to Canada’s increasing AI compute demand. Clients of the Bell AI Fabric project will access Cohere’s LLMs and other services alongside Bell’s infrastructure and tech advisory services, Ateko. The partnership aims to boost productivity and efficiency for organizations while maintaining data security and privacy.
Bell AI Fabric president Dan Rink highlighted that the collaboration serves the Canadian public sector at all levels, ensuring secure AI workloads on Canadian soil under strict data sovereignty rules. Bell has expressed interest in several projects under the $2-billion Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.
The federal government has invested up to $240 million in Cohere to build a multi-billion-dollar AI data center, in collaboration with US cloud firm CoreWeave, set to open next month in Cambridge, Ontario. This partnership extends Cohere’s public sector engagement, complementing its recent memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to deploy AI in public services.
Amid a rise in Canadian enterprises wanting to host data and applications domestically, Cohere has promoted its security advantages over US hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, which experienced a cybersecurity breach affecting about 100 organizations, including the Québec government.