If the clouds are gloomy near the border, then abroad they are definitely more cheerful.
During its existence, as The Telegraph notes, the British startup Graphcore managed to attract about $700 million, but at the end of the year before last, the company’s revenue halved to $2.7 million, and losses increased by 11% to $204.6 million. The company was forced to cut personnel and close foreign offices, and in China this was done under pressure from the American authorities. By May last year, Graphcore management realized the need to attract external funding. Negotiations with potential investors have not brought the desired result, and now Graphcore is trying to sell large stakes to strategic investors, including Arm, its parent Japanese corporation SoftBank, and startup OpenAI.
Image source: Graphcore
As you know, OpenAI founder Sam Altman is interested in creating his own computational accelerators, so a British developer of such solutions would be very useful to him. However, in recent years, British authorities have been jealous of deals in which foreign investors gain control of high-tech assets, so unless British sources of additional funding are found for Graphcore, the company may face an unenviable future. According to analysts at Jon Peddie Research, this developer will need significantly more than $1 billion to reach a level that allows it to compete with products from NVIDIA, Intel and AMD.