Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company Cohere will establish a local subsidiary in Korea. The plan is to strengthen its push into the Asia·Pacific ‘sovereign AI(AI sovereignty)’ market, where demand has surged recently.

Cohere announced at a press briefing held at the Westin Josun Hotel in Seoul on the 5th that it will establish independent subsidiaries in Korea and Japan by the end of this year.

Cohere is a Canadian company that builds AI models so that enterprises and governments can manage data directly without handing it over to external parties. It is expanding its sovereign AI business with a focus on securitycritical sectors such as finance·public sector·manufacturing. The company said its AsiaPacific customer base has grown about fivefold over the past year.

Before establishing the subsidiary, Cohere will expand local engineering staff and enterprise customer support in Korea. In Japan, it plans to deepen collaboration with Fujitsu to develop locally tailored AI solutions. It will also strengthen publicsector collaboration with Singapore.

Cohere set targets to double its technical·sales headcount in the AsiaPacific region by the end of this year and to expand its customer base more than threefold over the next year. By the end of next year, it plans to grow its AsiaPacific business foundation to more than four times the current level through new office openings and other initiatives.

Jang Hwa-jin, Cohere Head of AsiaPacific, said, “The AsiaPacific region is one of the most dynamic enterprise AI markets in the world” and “We are continuing to invest with local partners to build longterm sovereign AI capabilities.”

The first key partner for the Korea business is LG CNS. The two companies will implement Cohere’s enterprise agentic AI platform ‘North’ to fit local enterprise environments and will jointly develop Koreanlanguage·financespecialized AI agents using Cohere’s large language model (LLM). They also plan to expand from finance into manufacturing and distribution·services and to consider entering overseas markets.

Cohere emphasizes an ‘on-premises’ model in which companies keep data on their own servers rather than sending it to AI developers. With Mistral, a leading sovereign AI company in France, also preparing to enter the Korean market, Korea is emerging as a battleground for sovereign AI.

Frank ODowd, Cohere Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), said, “Cohere was designed from its founding to provide sovereign AI to enterprises in heavily regulated industries and to public institutions” and “We can deliver a complete enterprise AI platform in data centers, onpremises, or in cloud environments.”