Has the Cohere and Aleph Alpha merger closed?
Not yet. Cohere and Aleph Alpha, the German AI company, signed a definitive merger agreement on 16 September 2026, and the deal still needs regulatory approval, okara.ai wrote on 10 November. No source I could read reports the close. The money behind it is open too: on 29 October The Globe and Mail reported that Cohere had secured most of a round led by Schwarz Group, not all of it.
How does the deal read in the news Ins7ghts collected?
As a purchase, a merger and a partnership, depending on the article. In the news collected by Ins7ghts, our research platform, 84 articles named Aleph Alpha between 4 July and 11 November 2026. The busiest weeks were 26 October to 1 November, with 12 articles, and 5 to 11 October, with 11.
| Article date | Source | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Oct | The Globe and Mail | Cohere “had agreed on final terms on its proposed merger with Aleph Alpha” |
| 29 Oct | C.D. Howe Institute, Ursula von der Leyen | the two “announced a merger to create a transatlantic sovereign AI company” |
| 31 Oct | SANA | Cohere “operating in partnership with Germany’s Aleph Alpha” |
| 10 Nov | okara.ai | “Agrees to buy Aleph Alpha”, then “Signs the definitive Aleph Alpha agreement” |
Okara’s “buy” and The Globe’s “merger” are about the same agreement, signed in September. SANA’s “partnership” makes it sound smaller than it is. I could not find a close in any of them, so on this page it stays agreed.
What is the money, in which currency?
Cohere secured most of a round that “would value it at $35.7-billion”, The Globe wrote, in Canadian dollars. The Canadian government puts in up to C$1.6 billion of a planned C$7 billion; SANA gave the same Ottawa money as €1 billion, the same sum in euros. Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl and Kaufland and Aleph Alpha’s backer, led the round. The okara.ai piece still carries the earlier figure, about $20 billion in US dollars from Axios in April, so two valuations circulate for one round. Francois Chadwick, Cohere’s chief financial officer, told The Globe: “we will be looking to close soon.”
What does it mean if you buy sovereign AI?
Both companies sell AI you can run on infrastructure you control. Cohere sells its technology “as a sovereign alternative to that of U.S. and Chinese developers”, per The Globe. Aleph Alpha made its AI model Kolibri available on 3 October for German-English government and industry use, “developed and trained it in Europe with documented provenance for deployment on customer-controlled infrastructure”, according to a roundup on aitechmodel.com.
If Aleph Alpha is on your shortlist, ask whether Kolibri stays a product of its own after the merger, who supports it, and whether it keeps running on infrastructure you control. What to watch: two closes, the merger after regulatory approval and the Series E, each in Cohere’s own words.
Aleph Alpha’s full record in Ins7ghts holds every dated event with the article it came from: ins7ghts.com.
Small print. The counts describe the news Ins7ghts collected from 4 July to 11 November 2026, not all news about Aleph Alpha. Two articles in the record were not used because their sites refused our reader: AI Sphere Hub and AI Magazine. Dates are the articles’ publication dates. AI models read the articles, wrote this take and checked every quote against its source on 11 November; I checked the figures and currencies against the sources the same day. I see each take before it goes out.
