Today, Graphcore is proud to take the next step in our commitment to helping customers accelerate their innovation and harness the power of AI at scale. Together with Cirrascale Cloud Services, we have built something totally new for AI in the cloud, with the first publicly available Mk2 IPU-POD scale-out cluster, offering a simple way to add compute capacity on-demand, without the need to own and operate a datacentre. We recognise that the tremendous opportunity offered by AI brings with it a unique set of computing challenges; model size is growing rapidly, and the bar for accuracy is constantly being raised. If customers are to take full advantage of the latest innovations, they need a tightly integrated hardware and software system built specifically for artificial intelligence. Graphcloud is a secure and reliable IPU-POD family cloud service that allows customers to access the power of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), as they scale from experimentation, proof of concept and pilot projects to larger production systems.

While we mostly hear about Artificial Intelligence systems like IBM's Watson, which won Jeopardy! Over the last five years or so, Machine Learning, a type of AI, has been a quickly rising tide that's now starting to permeate nearly every corner of technology. From self-driving cars to online advertising, cybersecurity, and video surveillance, companies are training computers to do many of the things human workers have been doing but better, or at least cheaper. Neural networks, computer systems that aim to simulate the way neurons are interconnected in the human brain, are trained to do these tasks the same way babies learn about the world – by observation, repetition, trial, and error, assisted instead of parents by computer scientists – although babies are still much, much better at it. A neural net learns to understand spoken language, for example, by listening to a lot of recorded speech, such as movie dialogue; it learns to identify objects by looking at tons of images.