After months of searching for a buyer, troubled U.K.-based AI processor designer Graphcore said on Friday that it has been acquired by SoftBank. The company will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and will possibly collaborate with Arm, but what remains to be seen what happens to the unique architecture of Graphcore's intelligence processing units (IPUs).
Graphcore will retain its name as it will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank, which paid either $400 million (according to EE Times) or $500 million (according to BBC) for the company. Over its lifetime, Graphcore has received a total of $700 million of investments from Microsoft and Sequoia Capital, and at its peak in late 2020, was valued at $2.8 billion. Nigel Toon will remain at the helm of Graphcore, which will hire new staff in its UK offices and continue to be headquartered in Bristol, with additional offices in Cambridge, London, Gdansk (Poland), and Hsinchu (China).
