For people who aren’t following the AI business, one of many key metrics to watch for various these AI semiconductor startups is the quantity of funding they’re able to generate. While funding isn’t any express assure of success, it does point out maybe how a lot religion the enterprise capitalists (in addition to OEMs and different silicon distributors) have within the expertise. One of probably the most well-funded ventures on this area is Graphcore, and the corporate simply introduced its newest Series E funding spherical of $222 million, taking it to $710m complete throughout the 5 rounds.
Graphcore, primarily based in Bristol UK, is already on its second technology product, launching the Colossus MK2 GC200 in 2020. This chip incorporates 60 billion transistors, 900MB of built-in reminiscence, is manufactured on TSMC’s N7 node at 823 mm2, and might obtain 250 TFLOPs of AI compute. Graphcore bundles 4 of them right into a 1U chassis together with an Arm-based management chip and a loopy quantity of networking to allow a community containing as much as 64000 chips. Customers can order this IPU-M2000 unit, or 16 of them in a devoted rack. Graphcore additionally supplies the POPLAR software program stack, with direct assist for PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, and PaddlePaddle machine studying frameworks.
The newest $222m Series E funding spherical was led by Ontario Teachers’ Pensions Plan Board (what?), with extra funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders as new buyers. Previous buyers additionally participated, together with Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit. With the newest spherical of funding bringing the whole as much as $710m, this could put Graphcore at #2 by way of AI Chip pure-play startups. This is simply behind the $850m invested into Chinese semiconductor startup Horizon Robotics, based by a CEO Yu Kai a Baidu veteran, of which the newest $150m spherical completed in December. SambaNova is #three with $456m, and Nuvia has $293m. The newest spherical of funding brings Graphcore’s valuation to $2.77 billion.
With Graphcore’s first technology product, the corporate aligned with Dell to offer server models that includes eight add-in PCIe playing cards, every with two of its first technology IPUs. The firm is claiming that the most recent second technology MK2 is rolling out to extra prospects even throughout COVID occasions, particularly to tutorial analysis comparable to UMass, Oxford, and ICL. Official particulars on its company prospects appear considerably skinny, past an official tie-in with Microsoft, nevertheless Graphcore has mentioned that they’re at present working with hyperscalers and monetary service corporations.
This is maybe why Graphcore additionally stating that it has $440m cash-in-hand is kind of vital. As each startup has an efficient burn fee of capital, this must be ample for the corporate to additionally exit to allow extra prospects, in addition to develop subsequent technology merchandise. Graphcore has already introduced by way of TSMC that it’s already scoping TSMC’s 3nm course of for a future product line. Graphcore can also be a member of the just lately shaped MLCommons, the governing physique behind MLPerf, and expects to take part with its first submissions on MK2 in Q2 this 12 months.
Source: Graphcore
