It was not specified how much SoftBank paid to acquire Graphcore. However, people familiar with the matter claim that the amount paid was around 600 million dollars.
UK-based artificial intelligence chip developer Graphcore has been acquired by SoftBank. The deal, announced today, will help Softbank, founded by Masayoshi Son, accelerate its entry into the artificial intelligence industry, which has now become its main area of focus.
Founded in 2016, Graphcore is rumored to rival Nvidia, whose graphics processing units dominate the AI processing industry. The startup has created an alternative to these GPUs, known as customized intelligence processing units for the specific requirements of AI applications. The company will be included in SoftBank’s portfolio of technology companies alongside British semiconductor design company Arm.
Graphcore has attracted significant investment in the past and has received around $700 million in a series of rounds over the years.
The company sells its Bow IPU processors as part of a computing system called the Bow-2000 IPU Machine. Each system contains four Bow IPU processors, providing 1.4 petaflops of processing capacity. One petaflop equals one quadrillion computational operations per second.
