Japanese investment outfit SoftBank Group is rumoured to be in the final stages of discussions to snap up a British AI chip designer Graphcore
According to Bloomberg’s deep throats, a deal was possible after the two started nattering a few months back. But they’ve quickly pointed out that nothing’s set in stone yet, and the whole thing could still go pear-shaped.
Graphcore, which opened in Bristol in 2016, has been working on an intelligence processing unit (IPU). They reckon it’s a better fit for AI than Nvidia’s big server GPUs because it’s made from scratch for “fine-grained parallelism.”
This UK outfit has earned a lot from Sequoia Capital, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, and Samsung over the years, raking in enough to be worth a hefty £2.24 billion in 2020.
But things went a bit south after it rolled out some shiny new IPUs, claiming they could give Nvidia’s A100 GPU a run for its money. The global economy threw a spanner in the works, and sales took a nosedive. So much so, Graphcore’s takings took a 46 per cent hit down to £2.16 million, and they had to say cheerio to 21.7 per cent of its crew, leaving 494 bods on the books in 2022, as per the official records.
While Graphcore’s been having a bit of a time, Nvidia’s been laughing all the way to the bank. It tightened its grip on the AI computing market with its server GPUs and became one of the globe’s top dogs earlier this year.
In 2020, Graphcore fancied a crack at the channel and kicked off a partner programme across the pond in North America. Fast-forward to now, and they’ve pulled the plug on that, but the Graphcore mouthpiece says they’re still playing ball with some channel partners.
Since 2022, Graphcore has been trying to shake things up a bit, moving away from flogging IPU systems. They’re now all about getting folks hooked up to their gear in the cloud, teaming up with mates like Gcore in Europe and Paperspace in North America.
As Bloomberg previously revealed, SoftBank is eyeing Graphcore as it seeks to raise a whopping £80 billion for an AI chip venture to take on Nvidia. They used to have British chip designer Arm under their wing until last September when they sold the company to the stock market but kept most of the shares. Since then, Arm’s share price has shot up by 80 per cent.
