GRAPHCORE

Nigel Toon (CEO) and Simon Knowles (CTO) had decades of experience in semiconductor design — both had previously co-founded ICERA, a mobile chip company acquired by Nvidia. In 2016, they saw that AI computation was hitting the limits of GPU architecture and believed a clean-sheet chip design for AI could win.

They raised massive funding based on this thesis — $710 million total — and built the Colossus IPU, which they claimed was optimized for the irregular computation patterns that characterize machine learning.

Designs and manufactures Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) — specialized AI chips designed for machine learning workloads. Unlike Nvidia's GPUs (which were adapted from graphics), Graphcore's IPUs were purpose-built from scratch for AI computation.

Revenue comes from chip sales and cloud partnerships where customers can access IPU compute. The bet: purpose-built AI chips will eventually outperform adapted GPUs for specific AI workloads.

Colossus MK2 IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit), BOW IPU (latest generation with wafer-on-wafer technology), IPU-POD systems (scalable multi-IPU systems for data centers), Poplar SDK (software development kit for IPU programming), and IPU Cloud (cloud-based access to IPU compute through partnerships with Microsoft and others).

Differentiation through specialization. Graphcore has positioned IPUs for specific workloads where they outperform GPUs — particularly graph neural networks, recommendation systems, and sparse computation.

Cloud partnerships with Microsoft Azure and others give developers access without buying hardware. The company has also explored AI applications in healthcare and scientific computing where its architecture has genuine advantages.

Nvidia. Just...

Nvidia. Graphcore raised $710 million to compete with a company that has a $3 trillion market cap, a developer ecosystem of millions, and CUDA — the most entrenched software platform in AI.

Every time Graphcore convinced a potential customer that IPUs were technically superior for certain workloads, Nvidia would cut prices or release a new GPU that closed the gap. The AI chip market became a winner-take-most dynamic, and Nvidia was winning.

Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Baillie Gifford, BMW iVentures, Bosch, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, Samsung, and Draper Esprit have backed Graphcore.