CEO and Cofounder, Cohere
Reimagining Sovereign AI with Aidan Gomez | FII Priority ROME 2026 DAY2
Aidan Gomez, CEO & Co-Founder, Cohere and Moderator Barbara Carfagna, Journalist & Anchor, RAI discusses about the Economic Sovereignty and Technological control
About Aidan Gomez
Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere, has been speaking publicly about the need for Canada and European nations to develop sovereign AI capabilities. He has argued that outsourcing critical technology to a single foreign supplier creates a single point of failure and an existential risk to national security. To address this, Gomez promoted a partnership between Cohere and the German startup Aleph Alpha as a blueprint for international cooperation, and indicated the alliance is open to other countries, including Italy and Spain. He called for a "posture change" in Europe, shifting from a focus on regulation to one of innovation and domestic investment, and identified the lack of concentrated capital to fund capital-intensive AI projects as a major obstacle. In addition to discussing sovereign AI, Gomez addressed the high cost of AI infrastructure. He noted that cloud growth for major tech companies is booming but that the massive capital expenditure of approximately $700 billion combined across four major firms is compressing their margins, with Amazon's free cash flow down 95% year-over-year. He advocated for more efficient small models to meet demand and for better compensation for artists affected by AI-generated content. Gomez also emphasized the importance of private deployment of AI to protect critical infrastructure, stating that if software driving power grids or healthcare systems can be compromised, "you can shut down a country."
Transcript (22 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:02
Hi everybody. So, Aidan Gomez, you co-authored the Transformer paper that made today's generative AI possible. Looking back, did you imagine it would become not just a scientific breakthrough or just a tool, but a geopolitical infrastructure?
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Aidan Gomez0:29
Yeah, no, definitely not. I don't think any of us who were working on that project had any idea what was going to come of it. At the time when we were at Google, we were building it for just the translation system, and so we were focused on a very narrow slice of the problem. But I think it took us all by surprise what the community did with the technology. We built it for translation, but then suddenly there were applications into language modeling and all these other different areas — and at this point images, video, audio. It's been extraordinary to see, and I think next year it will be the 10-year anniversary of the Transformer.
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Interviewer1:06
So, you were a baby.
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Aidan Gomez1:07
I was close to a baby. But it'll be the 10-year anniversary and still we're using Transformers. Still, they're the backbone of every language model, whether it's our own, GPT, etc. So that, for me as a scientist, is a bit disappointing, right? As a good scientist, you want to create something important, but then you want to see someone else come and build on that work and beat it. And that hasn't happened for 10 years. So I'm very excited about what comes next.
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Interviewer1:38
So, what comes next? You are building what comes next. Cohere has chosen the enterprise and sovereign AI path rather than the consumer chatbot race. It's the real future of AI. Sorry. No, no. Is this the future of AI more embedded inside companies, governments, and critical processes?
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Aidan Gomez2:12
Absolutely. It's going to become fundamental infrastructure to every vertical. Obviously, intelligence is the most general and widely applicable function that exists in human society. It's in every single vertical. And I think AI technology first took off in the consumer space. We saw ChatGPT blow up. Then it started to take off in coding. And now what we're seeing is in enterprises mass adoption. That also means a lot of spend and sometimes even overspend — we've seen some stories around that. But more and more this is going to get integrated into the critical industries that power an economy. And so that's why sovereignty is so significant right now. Before it gets deployed into water treatment facilities, financial institutions, health care, etc., we need to ensure that we don't have third parties or foreign governments with the ability to just switch off critical infrastructure. And so that's what we at Cohere have been very focused on — ensuring that there is that resilience, that we're able to offer countries, governments, and their industry the ability to have a fully sovereign stack that they own and control.
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Interviewer3:30
And it is still transformer.
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Aidan Gomez3:33
It is, yeah. Still, these models are transformers.
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Interviewer3:36
But you are thinking about what there will be after transformer.
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Aidan Gomez3:40
Yeah, well, I've gotten excited a number of times. Like there were a number of research papers that came out that suggested, oh, maybe we can beat the transformer in this way — we'll make it more efficient on long sequences, for example, or instead of generating just one word at a time, we'll generate a bunch of words at a time. There were these ideas that emerged, and I got super excited. I spun up teams inside of Cohere focused on researching those, testing those. And then I like to call the Transformer a great artist because it steals. It steals ideas. So the Transformer just copied the ideas that emerged in these papers, integrated it into itself. And it's still what we use. So I don't know what comes next. I've gotten excited and disappointed a couple times.
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Interviewer4:28
Meanwhile, Europe is increasingly worried about dependence on American and Chinese AI platforms. In your opinion, can sovereign AI be a real industrial strategy, or is it just a defensive reaction to a technology already dominated by a few giants? For example, you acquired Aleph Alpha and opened in Paris. So, you believe that there could be a sovereign AI for Europe?
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Aidan Gomez5:04
I mean, it's not that I just believe it. It has to happen. This technology is going to form the bedrock of our defense, every single critical industry, our national productivity, our ability to perform advanced research. It will become the bedrock of our entire economy. And so there must be solutions to sovereignty that we need to find. Obviously, I believe Cohere is the most promising among those, and I think the example you gave of us merging with Aleph Alpha and the partnership between Canada and Germany, the digital alliance that they formed — it's a blueprint for what countries can do to come together to build truly sovereign capabilities that they fully control. Something that no one else can mess with or see the data inside of or switch off at will. That partnership between Canada and Germany, between Cohere and Aleph Alpha — it was never meant to be just two countries. It's an alliance that we want to expand. And so that door is wide open. And I think for countries in Europe like Italy, like Spain that we just announced a partnership with, we want to bring more and more countries into this alliance. And we're happy to give very, very strict guarantees to those countries in terms of sovereignty.
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Interviewer6:27
But AI is made of different layers, many layers, including the chips. So, will there be the possibility for one nation or one continent to have the full stack?
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Aidan Gomez6:50
That's completely correct. I think it would be incredibly inefficient for everyone to reinvent this entire stack, and that's not what I'm suggesting. I think what we need to do instead is partner. There needs to be concrete partnerships between countries that have guarantees around sovereignty, like what we're doing between Canada and Germany. But hopefully at other layers of the stack. We're the model layer, we're the agent application layer on top, but we also need those sorts of partnerships on chips, on infrastructure. Another thing that Cohere does that's a bit unique is instead of asking the customer to send their data over to us in one of our data centers with our model and we process it — instead of doing that, we take our model and our entire software stack on top and we send it to the customer. So it's fully in their control. We completely trust them with all of our IP. So we take the risk and they don't have to take the risk because they're in full control. We can't see in, we can't switch it off, but we can also deploy it in their national champion. So instead of them having to rely on a foreign cloud to manage the infrastructure, to manage the chips and facilities, it can be a domestic champion. Whether that's Stackit in Germany or Deutsche Telekom, etc., or Bell in Canada. So you have a sovereign-controlled player that actually runs these chips, or Humana in Saudi Arabia.
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Interviewer8:16
So, you are among the European champions. You were also invited in France these days for this reason, but you are Canadian. So people wonder why a Canadian should be in the system and building the system for Europe.
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Aidan Gomez8:35
Yeah, well, I think Canada has a very deep shared history with Europe. Of course, our parent nations are Britain and France. But me personally as well — my mother is British, I live in London now, my father is Spanish. And so I have a lot of passports. And I think Cohere in general does as well. There's something unique about Canada, which is we're a country of immigrants. And we're not a melting pot. We don't force people to give up their cultures and set that aside, leave that behind. Instead, we're a mosaic or a tapestry. People come and they retain their connection back home. And so when you are Canada selling out into the world, you have genuine deep relationships and connections to so much of the globe. And that's been a super helpful thing in terms of building trust, especially on something as sensitive as sovereignty when it amounts to the health of your people, the education of your people, the defense of your people. These are extremely trust-based matters.
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Interviewer9:42
So, you are offering to the governments a way out of American infrastructure dependency. How many of them are actually willing to pay the price of that exit? We are having news these days about France cutting with a lot of platforms and trying to build her own system.
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Aidan Gomez10:11
It shouldn't be an either/or. I don't like to think of sovereignty as decoupling from someone or not buying anything from some nation. It's about having a diverse supply chain. That's what promotes resilience. The whole point is that there's no one nation that can just switch off your economy overnight. That is the risk. And the way you mitigate that risk is not by not buying from anyone and just buying from yourself. Instead, it's by diversifying who you're buying from so that no one has too much leverage over you.
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Interviewer10:42
What does Europe have to do, in your opinion, in the next 3 years that it has not done in the last 10?
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Aidan Gomez10:52
I think a posture change from the default mode of trying to control technology being regulation to the default mode being innovation and building within the continent. There's a number of reasons why that hasn't happened. I do think there has been a big cultural shift in the past 12 to 18 months in Europe. People have recognized that simply buying technology from abroad is not a sustainable solution. And they have a much more ambitious domestic posture in terms of the investments they're willing to make, pointing their market strategically to create markets for sovereign technology. I think that needs to continue. The other major missing piece is capital concentration. Particularly in AI, you need massive capital to compete on the world stage and to build this technology. And really Europe has not set up the entities capable of writing significant checks to build these capital-intensive frontier-level pieces of technology. So that's a place where I think we really need to face down that if we don't have the ability to fund these projects, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will not get built here.
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Interviewer12:15
Thank you, Aidan Gomez, to be with us.
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Aidan Gomez12:17
Thank you so much.