Handelsblatt reported on Saturday 25 April 2026 that the Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger structure resolved at a 90/10 equity split in favour of Cohere, the Toronto-headquartered AI company, with Germany's Aleph Alpha taking the 10 per cent stake 1. Schwarz Group, the German retail conglomerate that owns Lidl and Kaufland and operates the cloud subsidiary STACKIT, anchors €500m of structured financing. The merged entity will operate dual headquarters in Canada and Germany; close is targeted for the second half of 2026.
The deal had been reported as unresolved four weeks after its initial announcement ; the 90/10 equity split and Schwarz Group's structured financing are the resolution. No formal filing had been submitted to the Bundeskartellamt, Germany's federal competition authority, as of 17 May 2026. German competition filings only publish after acceptance, so pre-notification dialogue may exist privately between the parties and the Bundeskartellamt; the absence of a publicly visible filing does not confirm absence of contact. The merged entity's competitive ground sits inside the European healthcare and justice deployments CAIDA will reserve for European providers and the AI Omnibus has just bought another 16 months of compliance breathing room on.
The Germany-Canada Sovereign Technology Alliance, launched at the Munich Security Conference earlier in 2026, is the diplomatic frame the parties have used to justify the merger as a sovereign-AI deal despite the 90 per cent Canadian equity outcome. The frame is visible in ministerial statements; the legal and competition machinery is not yet visible at all. Berlin has indicated through public messaging that German-deployment conditions will appear in the closing terms, but no enforceable version of those conditions has surfaced. The watchable detail before close is whether the Bundeskartellamt filing arrives in time to be processed inside the H2 2026 target window.
