Japan's SoftBank, which owns chip designer Arm, has acquired UK chipmaker Graphcore for an unspecified sum.

Graphcore announced the deal on Thursday in a brief statement penned by CEO Nigel Toon, who wrote the deal represents "a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, as well as a great outcome for our company."

The chip shop's key offering is a range of "Intelligence Processing Units" - accelerators for AI workloads - plus a software stack so developers can put its hardware to work.

The tech has often impressed: in 2022 we reported on a case study in which a Graphcore device trounced an Nvidia A100 GPU, and another in which its kit halved the time unspecified GPUs required to handle a drug discovery workload.

Despite those successes, the biz has struggled to win revenue and become profitable. In 2022 it reported revenue of just $2.7 million - down 46 percent year-on-year, and operating expenses of $206.8 million. Substantial job cuts followed as execs admitted it may struggle to remain a going concern.

A push into China was one way Graphcore hoped to turn things around - but that move was stymied by the US restricting sales of its product to the Middle Kingdom. While Graphcore struggled, Nvidia's revenue boomed as it became the de facto standard for generative AI infrastructure.

Toon predicted that SoftBank can help Graphcore compete.

"Demand for AI compute is vast and continues to grow. There remains much to do 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," the CEO wrote.

Vikas J Parekh, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, chipped in his own canned quote to the effect that "Next-generation semiconductors and compute systems are essential in the [artificial general intelligence] AGI journey, [and] we're pleased to collaborate with Graphcore in this mission."

Parekh didn't point out that SoftBank is already the majority owner of UK-based processor design firm Arm which, like every other semiconductor concern on the planet capable of spelling AI, plans to offer an alternative to Nvidia's hardware and software stacks.

Graphcore possesses one such alternative - and as noted above already has technical solid proof-of-concept. SoftBank's deep pockets, and links to Arm, may well see its financial performance improve. It could also give a fillip to Arm-powered servers, as Graphcore's products are mostly intended to be integrated with third-party hardware. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/12/softbank_acquires_graphcore/