(Bloomberg) — Artificial intelligence startup Kohia is partnering with Coreweave to build a multibillion-dollar data center in Canada with funding from the Canadian government.
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Headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, the company is one of Canada’s largest startups, valued at more than $5.5 billion and with approximately 400 employees.
The location of CoreWeave’s new AI data center has not yet been officially determined. Financial details were not disclosed. Cohere aims to train models and secure computing capacity in Canada, and is expected to provide significant investment in the project. The site also offers plenty of space for other players.
The government will support Cohere with up to C$240 million ($170 million) as part of Canada’s C$2 billion Sovereign AI Computing Strategy.
“Canada’s champions attracting billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure construction is a home run in policy implementation,” Francois-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, said in a statement.
Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, Cohere has an investor pool that includes Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., the Public Sector Pension Investment Board and a Montreal-based investment firm. raised $970 million from Innovia Capital.
Its technology started by using large-scale language models to generate text from prompts, but it was customized for businesses. In a letter to employees and investors on Thursday, Gomez said that as companies struggle to find ways to use generative AI, the company is currently exploring building more customized and secure models. He said he is doing so.
Kohia had annual revenue of $35 million at the end of March, up from $13 million at the end of 2023, the people said.
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