AI chip company Graphcore raises US$200 million, valued at US$1.7 billion

Sina Technology News Early morning news on December 19th, Beijing time, Graphcore, headquartered in the British port city of Bristol, has raised 158 million pounds (approximately US$200 million) from investors such as Microsoft and BMW. The company's business is to design chips for AI (artificial intelligence) purposes.

This latest financing round values ​​Graphcore at US$1.7 billion, making it the latest "unicorn" company among British startups this year. Previously, digital bank Monzo and cybersecurity company Darktrace have also become unicorn startups.

Graphcore is trying to create a new class of chips that can better handle the massive amounts of data needed to develop AI computers. The company believes that limitations in existing chips produced by companies such as Intel and Nvidia will delay the launch of AI computers. Graphcore has recently launched the first batch of Colossus intelligent processing units to customers and said that the company's chips are the first products in the world designed specifically for running machine learning programs.

The new funding round was led by British venture capital firm Atomico and Belgian investment firm Sofina, with participation from existing investors including Dell, Samsung, Sequoia Capital, Amadeus Capital and Draper Esprit.

Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon said the company plans to hire more staff at its Bristol headquarters and offices in London, the United States, Norway, mainland China and Taiwan.

In the last financing round last year, Graphcore raised US$30 million. Participants in the financing round at that time included Demis Hassabi, CEO of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence business.

Google is also developing its own chips for AI purposes, but the tensor processing unit (TPU) developed by the company has not yet been sold externally because Google plans to use it in its own data centers. Google's other competitors are also trying to develop similar chips, such as Qualcomm, Huawei and Nvidia.

“Machine intelligence marks the beginning of a new era of computing, which requires a fundamentally different kind of processor and software tools than before.” Thune said. "This rapidly growing new market creates an opportunity for Graphcore to build a large global technology company where we can help innovators in the AI ​​field achieve major breakthroughs." (Tang Feng)