As of May 1, you won’t be able to go to Ottawa’s Capital Exhibition Centre, also known as the EY Centre, anymore. Instead, you’ll have to catch your conferences at the Cohere Centre, after the venue announced a rebrand in partnership with the leading Canadian AI company.
The newly christened Cohere Centre is the largest venue of its kind in Ottawa.
The exhibition and event facility announced the name change on April 30, stating that it had entered into a naming rights agreement with Cohere. Changes to the venue’s signage and branding reflecting the new name will be rolled out over the coming weeks. As of today, a new website has been launched. The EY Centre’s page remains active and does not redirect to the new site as of press time.
Owned and operated by the Shenkman Group of Companies, the newly dubbed Cohere Centre is a 200,000-square-foot exhibition and meeting space near the Ottawa International Airport. It’s the largest venue of its kind in Ottawa, hosting everything from conferences and trade shows to corporate and government events.
“This partnership reflects our shared commitment to Canadian innovation, collaboration, and creating spaces where important ideas and meaningful connections can thrive,” Cohere’s Dave Ferris said in a statement released on Thursday. “We are pleased to support a venue that brings together business, government, technology, and community in the nation’s capital.”
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BetaKit reached out to both Cohere, and the Cohere Centre’s general manager, Neill Bales, to ask for details about the terms of the agreement and the dollar figure associated with the naming agreement and rebrand, but neither responded to our questions as of press time.
In a press release, Bales called the partnership a “testament to Ottawa’s emergence as a hub for innovation and world class events.”
Cohere primarily focuses on enterprise-grade, large language models and AI for business applications. Earlier this month, the company announced that it plans to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha. The joint entity will reportedly be valued at $20 billion USD, or $27 billion CAD. Its global headquarters is in Toronto, San Francisco and Germany, with offices in London, New York, Montreal, Paris and Seoul, South Korea.
Feature image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.