SoftBank recently officially announced the acquisition of the UK artificial intelligence chip company Graphcore, making it a fully-owned subsidiary. Although the specific transaction amount has not been publicly disclosed, Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon stated that this is a positive outcome for most people.
Graphcore was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Bristol, UK, where it developed a new processor called the "Intelligent Processing Unit" (IPU). Unlike the Graphics Processing Units (GPU) developed by companies like Nvidia, the IPU is designed with an architecture specifically for artificial intelligence workloads.
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Graphcore's IPU is promoted as a more efficient alternative to GPUs, especially in supporting large-scale parallel processing and executing complex machine learning models, which are characterized by tight coupling between models and data. Despite Graphcore having raised about $700 million in funding and reaching a valuation of nearly $3 billion by the end of 2020, its potential in the cloud computing field was limited, especially after losing a potential partnership with Microsoft, which affected its prospects.
SoftBank has previously acquired the UK semiconductor company Arm and retained shares after spinning it off as a $55 billion public company. Arm is now valued at nearly $2 trillion, showing SoftBank's strong presence in the semiconductor industry. The acquisition of Graphcore by SoftBank means that the company can obtain more financial support to drive its development in the artificial intelligence hardware market, especially during this critical period of technological development.
Graphcore's management team confirms that the company's headquarters will continue to be located in Bristol, UK, and will have offices in London, Cambridge, Gdansk, Poland, and Hsinchu, Taiwan. Toon and CTO and co-founder Simon Knowles will continue in their executive and board roles. The transaction is considered a relatively positive outcome for Graphcore's existing employees and investors, although the equity of some former employees may be affected by the transaction.
For the future, SoftBank investment advisor management partner Vikas J. Parekh emphasizes that Graphcore will play an important role in its pursuit of artificial intelligence technology development. He points out that the next-generation semiconductor and computing systems are crucial in the journey of general artificial intelligence, and SoftBank is pleased to cooperate with Graphcore on this mission.
The acquisition of Graphcore by SoftBank not only marks the deepening of the strategic cooperation between the two companies but also provides a more solid foundation for Graphcore's future development in the artificial intelligence hardware field.
**Key Points:**
- 💼 SoftBank officially acquires the UK chip company Graphcore, becoming its fully-owned subsidiary.
- 🤝 The terms of the transaction are not disclosed, but the Graphcore CEO says it's a positive result for most people.
- 🖥️ Graphcore's developed Intelligent Processing Unit (IPU) is considered a potential alternative to compete with Nvidia.