Graphcore Was the UK's AI Champion--Now It's Scrambling to Stay Afloat

Last month, the UK government announced the home for its new exascale supercomputer, designed to give the country an edge in the global artificial intelligence race. The £900 million ($1.1 billion) project would be built in Bristol, a city in the west of England famed for its industrial heritage, and the machine itself would be named after the legendary local engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Brunel AI project should have been a big moment for another Bristolian export--Graphcore, one of the UK's only large-scale chipmakers specializing in designing hardware for AI. Valued at $2.5 billion after its last funding round in 2020, the company is trying to offer an alternative to the US giant Nvidia, which dominates the market. With AI fast becoming an issue of geopolitical as well as commercial importance, and countries--including the UK--spending hundreds of millions of dollars on building strategic reserves of chips and investing in massive supercomputers, companies like Graphcore should be poised to benefit.