these IPUs together, so you can have
thousands of processors that all work
together.” The startup has a customer
support and business development team
in Palo Alto, and is building an equivalent
operation based in Beijing.
Graphcore plainly has a decent shot
at becoming one of European tech’s
outsized success stories, perhaps even
eclipsing the likes of Spotify (approx-
imate market cap: $26 billion), Yandex
($12 billion), Zalando ($9.5 billion),Above: The Colossus GC2 intelligence
processing unit undergoing testing
in Graphcore’s Bristol laboratorylevel, at the algorithm and application
level – I wouldn’t say they are a long way
behind, they’re running very quickly.”
Knowles adds that while China “can
certainly build chips”, designing “state
of the art microprocessors” like Graph-
core’s is a different matter. Historically,
China has not had chip design capabil-
ities – it has not had chip manufacturing
capabilities until fairly recently – so it
hasn’t got that indigenous expertise. But
the Chinese diaspora has been studying
and working in the west. “And now that
China is becoming a more attractive
place to live, I’m sure they are going back
to China, bringing their skills with them,
and China will learn to do this.”While there may not be viable Chinese
competitors to Graphcore – at least
not in the short term – in Europe it’s a
different story, and startups focused
on AI hardware are emerging fast.
“It’s a highly competitive space, and
there are quite a few startups trying
to do this now,” says Atomico’s Siraj
Khaliq. “However, they have different
approaches, and I have not seen one with
a better approach [than Graphcore].”
But he does concede that people will
eventually copy Graphcore’s approach,
which means that Knowles and Toon will
only succeed long term by moving faster,
continuously innovating, and having an
array of products in the pipeline.
Hauser, too, accepts that there are
“lots of startups trying to do this”, but
says Graphcore has two big advantages.
First, it was fastest out of the blocks.
Second, it “got extremely lucky” in
that the members of one of the best
chip design units in the world – the
Knowles team that went to NVIDIA in
the Icera exit – were made redundant at
the precise moment Graphcore needed
them. “Normally with a startup, you’re
not given one of the world’s best design
teams on a plate,” he says. “They [went
on to] produce the world’s largest and
most complex chip in one and a half years- and they were right first time.”
It’s fair to say that Toon and Knowles
have ridden that initial luck. By their own
calculations they have gone on to raise
a total of $329 million over four rounds
as they scale at a ferocious pace. With
around 270 employees today, Knowles
and Toon expect to swell the ranks to up
to 500 by the end of 2019. “Last week, we
added ten people,” observes Toon. “We
are in the process of building up a team
in Cambridge, and we are hiring here
in Bristol at a massive rate. We’re also
ramping up our team in Oslo, who are
building a technology for how we connect15609-19-FTgraphcore.indd 156 19/07/2019 17:07