Graphcore
More info
- Creator
- Nigel Toon, Simon Knowles
- Released
- 2016
- Owner
- SoftBank (since 2024)
- Type
- Semiconductor company
British AI chip startup that designed its own processor architecture, the IPU, and became Europe's great hope against Nvidia — until SoftBank bought what was left in 2024.
Founded in Bristol, the company built the Intelligence Processing Unit: thousands of small cores with large amounts of SRAM right on the die instead of an external memory bus. The bet was that neural networks with irregular compute graphs would run faster if the data never had to leave the chip. The software stack was called Poplar.
Graphcore raised close to $700 million and hit a $2.8 billion valuation in 2020. Its problem was every challenger's problem: researchers already wrote for CUDA, and once language models outgrew what fits in on-chip SRAM, much of the advantage evaporated. SoftBank acquired it in 2024 for a fraction of the peak valuation.