Graphcore is hiring again after acquiring SoftBank – but what do the roles tell us about its future focus?
- Recruitment activities would increase Graphcore’s workforce by 20%
- The announcement marks the first major steps since the SoftBank acquisition
- Roles available in silicon design, software and infrastructure
Graphcore has announced plans for a new hiring campaign just months after its historic acquisition by SoftBank.
The British AI chip manufacturer has announced that it has 75 open positions covering a range of business functions including silicon design, data center infrastructure management, hardware engineering and AI research.
“Whether your expertise is in silicon, systems, software, AI research or any of the other functions we are expanding, this is an opportunity to work at the top of your field,” said CEO Nigel Toon.
Graphcore hiring wave
The recruitment campaign represents a 20% increase in Graphcore’s total workforce and includes positions across all of its global offices.
The company currently has offices in Bristol, Cambridge and London in the UK, along with offices in Gdansk, Poland, and Hsinchu City, Taiwan.
Graphcore was acquired by SoftBank in July 2024 in a deal described by Toon as a “huge support” for the company. As part of the deal, the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese investment bank.
Although the financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, the deal is believed to be worth approximately $600 million, which represents a significant downgrade from its 2020 valuation of approximately $2.5 billion.
Toon described the deal as a “great show of support” for the company and said the acquisition is a “great outcome”.
What does this move say about Graphcore’s future plans?
In its announcement, Graphcore said the move builds on a commitment to “continue investing in the creation of highly skilled jobs spanning a range of disciplines” in the wake of the acquisition.
However, the open positions do point towards potential future plans, especially regarding chip design. Of the 75 positions Graphcore is recruiting for, 10 are in Silicon Engineering Design alone, suggesting the company plans to ramp up development of its next-generation chips.
Graphcore currently has three generations of silicon, with the most recent – the Bow Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) – released in 2022. The Bow IPU delivers up to 350 teraflops of AI computing power and features a 40% performance boost and 16% efficiency boost compared to the company’s previous generation IPU.
However, unlike other processors available on the market, Graphcore’s IPUs do not use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) technology. Instead, they rely on internal SRAM.
Chips from competitors do use HBM, including Intel, AMD and Nvidia.
With a large number of positions available in the silicon design department, this begs the question of whether Graphcore could shake up its design to include HBM capabilities.
Similarly, advertised roles in the infrastructure solutions and software divisions could also indicate a change in direction for Graphcore, perhaps with a focus on sharpening its data center capabilities.
It wouldn’t be alone here either. Nvidia offers its own software and infrastructure options for AI inference. This has been crucial to its rapid rise during the generative AI boom.
AMD has also focused heavily on its own data center segment in recent years to keep pace with Nvidia.
