Cohere Warns: Relying on US/China AI is a Trap Since They Own 90% of Compute

The sudden block of foreign access to Anthropic's Mythos model by US authorities served as a brutal wake-up call for the tech world. Aidan Gomez, the boss of Canadian AI unicorn Cohere, pointed out that relying on a single foreign provider is a structural risk that can turn any business into a digital brick overnight.

The geopolitical math is terrifyingly simple: the US and China control roughly 90% of the world's supercomputing power. Outside this cozy duopoly, the rest of the world is basically begging for API scraps, with only a few independent players like Cohere and French Mistral AI trying to keep the lights on.

This has triggered a mad scramble for "sovereign AI," a fuzzy buzzword that politicians love because it can mean anything from "we keep our data local" to "we pretend to build chips." But Gomez argues that true sovereignty isn't about policy papers; it's about physically owning the entire stack—from the silicon inside the servers to the power lines feeding them.

Conveniently, Cohere has a product for this exact anxiety, offering models that can run completely offline, cut off from the internet and safe from foreign regulators' whims. To back up his transatlantic ambitions, Gomez recently bought German AI firm Aleph Alpha in a deal valuing the combined entity at $20 billion, aiming to build a Western counterweight to the Big Tech monopoly.

Democratic leaders are already nodding in agreement at G7 summits, whispering about "coordination" while secretly realizing they are completely dependent on a handful of server farms in Virginia and Shenzhen. The dream of digital independence is beautiful, but building a sovereign supercomputer requires more than just national pride—it requires billions of dollars, oceans of energy, and chips that are currently only made in one very contested island.

Source: Fortune