Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles in Bristol, United Kingdom. The company designed the IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit), a processor with a massively parallel architecture optimized for the irregular compute patterns common in machine learning.
Graphcore raised over $730 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, BMW iVentures, Microsoft, Samsung, and the UK government. At its peak, the company was valued at $2.8 billion.
The IPU architecture differs fundamentally from GPUs: it uses bulk synchronous parallel processing with large amounts of on-chip SRAM memory, enabling it to handle the sparse, dynamic compute graphs found in many ML models more efficiently than GPU architectures designed for dense matrix operations.
Graphcore’s Bow IPU, launched in 2022, was the first processor to use wafer-on-wafer 3D stacking technology from TSMC. The company’s Poplar SDK provides a software stack for programming IPUs, with integration into popular ML frameworks.
In 2024, Graphcore was acquired by SoftBank, which plans to use the company’s technology in its broader AI and semiconductor strategy. Before the acquisition, Graphcore served research institutions, cloud providers, and enterprises. The company employed over 500 people with offices in the UK, US, Asia, and Europe. Graphcore’s story illustrates both the potential and challenges of building alternative AI chip architectures.
