Cohere Triples London Office in UK Sovereign AI Push

Canada’s Cohere is tripling its physical footprint in the UK, signing a lease on a new London office as it races to position itself as the credible alternative to American rivals OpenAI and Anthropic for governments and regulated businesses nervous about handing their data to Silicon Valley.

The artificial intelligence start-up will move into a 14,000 sq ft office at 100 New Oxford Street later this year, leaving its current home in Soho. The new site has room for up to 100 staff, against roughly 80 today, and gives the company a far larger shopfront in the capital as demand for so-called “sovereign AI” accelerates.

Founded in 2019, Cohere builds large language models tailored to businesses and governments rather than consumers. Its co-founder and chief executive, Aidan Gomez, is among the most influential AI researchers in the world, having helped develop the “transformer” architecture that underpins virtually every modern large language model, including the systems built by his much larger American competitors.

The expansion is the latest sign that the global AI land grab has firmly reached London. It follows OpenAI’s decision to open its first permanent London office in King’s Cross, a site with capacity to more than double its headcount to 544, while Anthropic plans to quadruple its own London presence just a few streets away from its bitter rival.

Where the American giants compete on raw capability, Cohere is selling reassurance. The company promises not to retain customer data and offers models that can be deployed on-premises or inside private clouds, an approach designed to appeal to governments and heavily regulated sectors such as finance, defence and healthcare. Its UK customers already include Reuters, the Aston Martin Formula One team and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

That pitch was sharpened in April when Cohere acquired the German start-up Aleph Alpha to create what it called a “transatlantic AI powerhouse”, pitched squarely at European customers wary of depending on US developers. The combined group was valued at around $20bn.

“By expanding our London footprint threefold, we’re positioning ourselves at the heart of the UK’s sovereign AI revolution, where government and enterprise interest in secure artificial intelligence is accelerating,” Gomez said.

Sovereign AI refers to a state or organisation’s ability to develop, deploy and govern AI tools independently, without relying on foreign infrastructure. It has climbed rapidly up the political agenda amid mounting concern that Europe is dangerously dependent on US models and cloud providers. Building “sovereign” capability is now a stated priority for both the UK government, which has stood up a dedicated £500m Sovereign AI unit to back home-grown firms, and the European Union, which launched its technology sovereignty legislation earlier this month.

The numbers help explain the rush. McKinsey estimates that sovereignty requirements could shape between $500bn and $600bn of AI spending by 2030, as much as a third of the entire market.

Kanishka Narayan, the minister for AI and online safety, welcomed the move. “Cohere’s focus on sovereign AI, helping businesses and government deploy this technology securely, on their own terms, is exactly the kind of capability we are building in Britain,” he said.

For all the political enthusiasm, the sovereign AI story is not without its sceptics. The same security promise that makes these models attractive can cut the other way: regulators have begun to warn that even tightly controlled enterprise systems can expose systemic weaknesses in sensitive sectors such as banking. For Cohere, convincing Whitehall and the City that “sovereign” genuinely means safer will matter every bit as much as the square footage on New Oxford Street.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.