Cohere hits $7B valuation a month after its last raise, partners with AMD (techcrunch.com)

Cohere announced a $100 million extension to its August financing, lifting its valuation to $7 billion, and revealed a strategic partnership with AMD. The August round was an oversubscribed $500 million raise at a $6.8 billion valuation; new investors in this extension include Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management. Separately, Cohere said its full Command-family models — including Command Vision, Translate and Reasoning — are now supported on AMD’s Instinct GPUs, and AMD will be a customer of Cohere’s services. Cohere also stressed it will continue to support Nvidia hardware rather than switching exclusivity. For the AI/ML community this is notable on two fronts: capital and compute choice. The funding reaffirms investor interest in enterprise-oriented model providers even as rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic command much larger public valuations. Technically, production-quality support for AMD Instinct means enterprises and cloud providers gain a viable alternative to Nvidia for running large models, aiding hardware diversification and on‑prem deployments where data and model sovereignty matter. That matters for customers prioritizing local control or different procurement stacks, and for ecosystem players optimizing software stacks and inference/training workflows across AMD and Nvidia platforms. Cohere’s roots (co‑founder Aidan Gomez helped author the Transformer paper) and continued enterprise focus position it as a pragmatic option for organizations prioritizing sovereignty and multi-vendor flexibility.