Graphcore is now a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. Since its 2024 acquisition, Graphcore has renewed investment backing and strategic depth, continuing R&D from its UK base.

• It designed the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), a processor architected from first principles for machine intelligence rather than adapted from graphics.
• An IPU's architecture is genuinely different: thousands of independent processor tiles with In-Processor-Memory (massive on-chip SRAM) hold entire models close to compute, delivering exceptional performance on workloads with irregular, sparse, or fine-grained parallelism.
• Beyond mainstream ML, IPUs have shown strong results in scientific computing domains with graph-structured or sparse problems [particle physics, protein interaction, computational chemistry] offering researchers an architecture for problems where GPUs are not optimal. For UK institutions, working with a domestic AI silicon company also supports sovereign capability agendas.
• IPU systems disaggregate compute from host servers, simplifying data-feeding architecture; OCF designs appropriate storage pipelines around them.

Graphcore created a fundamentally different AI procesor that is memory-centric and excellent for sparse and fine-grained models.