The Canadian startup, an Nvidia Corp.-backed developer of artificial intelligence models for businesses, is confronting shortages of what the industry calls compute, the sheer computational power needed to churn through the training and operation of models. Without its own data centers, Cohere depends on cloud providers like the big names like Microsoft Corp’s Azure or the so-called neocloud providers like CoreWeave Inc.

“We really have to fight to get access to compute,” Gomez said in an interview with Bloomberg in Tokyo on Wednesday. “There is a dearth of supply. We need much more compute. We need the energy, the facilities, the chips to support that.”

Gomez is visiting Japan this week to help expand Cohere’s business with Japanese enterprise customers and government agencies. His comments underscore demand for AI chips and processing, which was also highlighted by CoreWeave’s robust earnings overnight. CoreWeave reported better-than-expected sales of US$3.66 billion for the September quarter, helped by growing relationships with clients including Cohere.

“We might be over-indexing to fear in this present moment, but hopefully the build-out continues, and those supply pressures do alleviate,” Gomez said.

He’s added his voice to a global debate about the intensity of spending on building out AI data centres, which are coming in for greater skepticism as costs rise, projects run into unforeseen challenges and communities increasingly protest the setup of such facilities in their locales. SoftBank Group Corp on Tuesday announced it was writing down US$3.7 billion in costs associated with its US data centre projects, as the company best known for its investments transitions into a hardware and infrastructure developer.

Toronto-based Cohere, which seeks to sell its services in support of countries pursuing sovereign AI, last month raised as much as US$5 billion in a funding round valuing it at more than US$20 billion.

Cohere and Nvidia are working together to develop custom AI models optimised for the US chipmaker’s platforms. Gomez described the recent revelations about Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang’s infidelity as “a really unfortunate episode” — one that would deal a great blow if he’s forced to step down from his post. Huang’s extramarital affair is being probed by the FBI and Nvidia-appointed independent investigators over allegations it may have been with a Chinese spy.

“Any change of leadership, especially with someone as effective, and with such a strong vision as Jensen would be quite disruptive,” he said. “Jensen has been leading the company for 30 years, it’s his vision that really carried it to the place that it is today.”

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