Japanese Arm owner gets bargain with Graphcore purchase — could a British startup hampered by a lack of support embrace Arm’s licensing strategy to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI?
UK-based AI chip developer Graphcore was once seen as a potential competitor to Nvidia and AMD, but the company has found itself in dire straits after failing to capitalise on the AI boom.
In February 2024, we wrote that Graphcore urgently needed to raise significant funds before May to survive, and that a number of potential buyers were clustering around the troubled company. These included Arm, Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank (which owns a majority stake in Arm), and OpenAI.
SoftBank was always the most likely candidate, and has now been confirmed as the new owner of Graphcore, paying somewhere between $400 and $500 million for the company. The exact price has not been confirmed.
But what now?
“Society is embracing the opportunities presented by fundamental models, generative AI applications, and novel approaches to scientific discovery,” said Vikas J. Parekh, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “Next-generation semiconductors and computing systems are essential in the AGI journey, and we are excited to partner with Graphcore on this mission.”
Graphcore will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank (which will continue to operate under the Graphcore name) and will likely maintain closer ties with Arm. The company will remain headquartered in Bristol, with offices in Cambridge, London, Gdansk and Hsinchu (it previously closed offices in Norway, Japan and South Korea). Co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon will remain in charge of Graphcore.
“This is a great endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, and a great outcome for our business,” Toon said. “The demand for AI computing is enormous and continues to grow. Much remains to be done to improve efficiency, resilience and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI. In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology.”
It remains to be seen what the future holds for Graphcore and how SoftBank will profit from its latest acquisition. Licensing its IP to Arm seems like the obvious first step.
