AI
COHERE AND ALEPH ALPHA NOW MERGED
Five months after the first announcement, Cohere and Aleph Alpha have signed their final merger agreement. A legal step, of course, but also a signal to the market: in artificial intelligence, the race is no longer just about model performance. During its first steps, Aleph Alpha embodied the European ambition to build an equivalent of OpenAI. The comparison was appealing: a German startup developing its own large language models, backed by industry players and enjoying significant political support. Now Aleph Alpha gradually abandoned the idea of going head-to-head with the most powerful labs in the so-called generalist model space. The company refocused on specialized models and their integration into business and government environments. On its side, Cohere had already chosen this path. Its models are designed to be able to be deployed in the customer environment rather than relying exclusively on a consumer cloud service. The company is thus targeting enterprises, governments and administrations.
What about the merging’s expectations? Cohere brings the models, commercial infrastructure, and an international presence; Aleph Alpha brings knowledge of the European public sector, institutional relationships, and expertise in deploying AI in environments where regulation, security, and data control are key. Moreover, the new company brings another notion of sovereignty: it will be a transatlantic group: rather than trying to build an entire national value chain alone, it’s about having enough control over models, data, infrastructure, and their governance to avoid being completely dependent on a single provider or jurisdiction.
THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY ESA AND MISTRAL PARTNERS
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Mistral have signed in Paris on September 16 a Letter of Intent establishing a strategic framework to deepen their collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI). The agreement reflects a shared ambition to strengthen Europe’s technological leadership, competitiveness and resilience in both AI and space activities. The framework will enable the two organisations to explore strategic opportunities by combining Mistral’s expertise in advanced AI models and infrastructure with ESA’s engineering, scientific and operational activities.
MOZILLA FOUNDATION AND MISTRAL PARTNERS
The American foundation Mozilla is partnering with the French startup Mistral AI to power Smart Window, the brand-new smart search feature built into the Firefox browser. Announced on September 16, 2026, this partnership aims to offer a computer-assisted web experience that preserves data privacy and gives users full control. The rollout starts immediately in France and North America before a planned global expansion by the end of the year.
For those who regularly search for complex information online, their digital routine is about to change. Web browsing is now enhanced with smart assistants that can summarize your pages and analyze your open tabs. By choosing European technology to power its flagship tool, Firefox is shaking up industry habits. This partnership between two open software pioneers provides a real alternative to the US Tech giants
CLOUD SERVICES
INFOMANIAK THE SWISS DATA CENTER WHICH CHALLENGES THE BIG ONES
In its data centers, INFOMANIAK offers three features which attract customers: less energy consumption and focus on renewable energy sources, data protection and sovereignty.
QUANTUM COMPUTING
A PROGRAM TO DEVELOP QUANTUM FIT SOFTWARE
Besides PROQCIMA,a French Defense program to help develop Quantum computing hardware, now comes ALIQUANTE, a project dedicated to the software side. It’s focused on development and aims to set up a sovereign platform capable of programming quantum processors (Quantum Processing Units, QPUs) and preparing for the use of PROQCIMA’s quantum computers. Lasting five years, this project has been entrusted to a consortium made up of Thales Research & Technology (TRT), BULL SAS, and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).
In a classified environment, the sovereign platform being developed will allow the emulation of quantum computers and the development of programming tools common to the different underlying qubit technologies.
