For years, there has been heated debate and hand-wringing about how Canadian tech companies can grow without leaving. 

This week, we saw a new example of how it can be done.

Cohere bought Aleph Alpha, the German AI company once positioned as Berlin's answer to OpenAI. I know they said merger, but I’m not convinced you ever really get mergers. One culture always wins in the end.  

Alberta gave its provincial agencies the legal authority to take equity stakes in Alberta tech companies and opened a new IP office in the same week. 

Ottawa opened applications for sovereign AI supercomputing infrastructure. 

And the Canadian Startup Capital Association launched as a national coalition for early-stage investors who, until this week, were not really talking to each other.

At the Cohere announcement in Berlin on April 24, Canada's Minister of AI and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon framed the deal as a stand against concentrated power. 

"We need to make sure that the power does not rest in the hands of a few dominant players," he said. 

The framing echoes Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech earlier this year, in which he argued for middle-power cooperation among countries that don't want to choose between American hyperscalers and Chinese state tech. (In case you’ve been living under a rock.)

The Cohere deal is the clearest private-sector example of that argument since.

The question I find interesting is whether it’s too optimistic to think that this might be a sign that we are moving from talk to action. Or, is it just a blip?

Toronto-based AI company Cohere is acquiring German Aleph Alpha, with both the Canadian and German governments on stage for the announcement. Handelsblatt valued the combined company at roughly $20 billion. Cohere keeps its name and Toronto HQ, and adds a second global headquarters in Heidelberg. Schwarz Group, the German parent of Lidl and Kaufland and an existing Aleph Alpha backer, committed €500 million to Cohere's upcoming Series E. The deal also brings Aleph Alpha's German federal and Baden-Württemberg government contracts onto Cohere's books.

Nice to see a Canadian company taking the kind of step that too often goes the other direction.

If deals like Cohere's are going to become the norm rather than the exception, Canada needs to build the conditions that make them possible.

In Alberta, Alberta Innovates now has the legal authority to take minority equity stakes in Alberta tech companies. Jennifer Friesen spoke with CEO Mike Mahon about what that means in practice. The catch: provincial money can only follow a qualified private lead. The point isn't to compete with VC. It's to prevent the cap tables of Alberta companies from being rewritten by U.S. investors when larger funding rounds come.

Alberta also opened a new IP Office. "If the majority of the intellectual property that arises from that research funding ends up being commercialized in the hands of American companies or other foreign companies creating wealth for foreign shareholders, then we've completely lost the plot as a country," Nate Glubish, Alberta's Minister of Technology and Innovation, told Chris Hogg. In 2024, Canadians filed 12% of patent applications in Canada. Americans filed 44%.

Federally, Ottawa opened applications for sovereign AI supercomputing infrastructure. And the Canadian Startup Capital Association launched with 19 founding members and a straightforward pitch: Canada has the wealth and the founders. What it doesn't have is the connective tissue between them.

There's work still to do. Alberta has authority without regulations. The IP Office is $8 million and four advisors. The compute program is taking applications. The CSCA is a coalition with a website.

No results yet. But it beats another roundtable.

Some light reading for when AI billionaires are airing each other's secrets instead of monetizing yours.

Toast CEO April Hicke called on men to step up. Her argument: women can't dismantle the patriarchy alone because women don't run it, and the most powerful unused lever for closing the gap is sponsorship from the men who do. She offers a clear set of behaviours for what stepping up looks like. Worth reading. (Men.)

Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI heads to a jury. $134 billion in damages, the ouster of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and a judge who's already noted that Musk's team seems to be "pulling numbers out of the air." Also, Brockman's 2017 personal journal is in evidence. I'll make the popcorn.

OpenAI says GPT-5.5 is "a new class of intelligence," which is what OpenAI says about every model. "There are enough model releases that it's probably going to be hard to distinguish one from another," Brockman said in the briefing. I know I'm losing count.

Terri Davis says hiring "normal" is more dangerous than hiring badly. Most companies hire for a job description rather than to a stated problem, because writing the description is easier than having the strategic conversation about what the real problem is. A useful gut check if you're filling a senior role.

I can't tell you whether this week is the start of something or a blip. 

What I can say is that for the first time in a while, the conversation feels less like political finger-pointing and more like a genuine interest in helping Canadian companies scale here, not just talking about it. 

Maybe the rupture Carney described at Davos turns out to be the moment we stopped waiting and started building. I'd rather end the year having been too optimistic about that than the other way around.

— David