Delivery Hero ($7.5 billion) and ARM
itself, which was acquired by SoftBank
for $32 billion in 2016. And yet the
pick of the UK-born AI startups – such
as DeepMind (acquired by Google),
Magic Pony (Twitter), Evi Technol-
ogies (Amazon), Vocal IQ (Apple), and
SwiftKey (Microsoft) – have generally
been purchased by one of the American
goliaths before making it to global scale.
Might Graphcore follow suit?“We’ve certainly done that before,”
concedes Toon, referring to the earlier
exits at Element 14 and NVIDIA. “But we
think our market is massive – it’s not like
this is going to be a small thing inside
someone else’s chip; this is a standalone,
independent piece of tech that will be
sold on a very large scale. So that would
suggest this is a standalone company –
and all of the investors we’ve had so far
are there for the long term.”“They’re carefully chosen for that,”
says Knowles, and Toon smiles. “When
Matt Miller, from Sequoia, came for his
very first board meeting – and Matt’s a
big guy – he looks around the room at
all the other investors and says: ‘Look,
the first one of you to talk about selling
this company, I’m going to punch you
on the nose.’ He said it as a piece of fun,
but that is what Sequoia does – it builds
big companies that go public, and he just
wanted to make sure that all the other
investors were on the same page.” So
is Graphcore’s goal ultimately to IPO?
The answer is unambiguous: “That’s
the path we’re shooting for, absolutely.”
Currently, the appetite in Europe,
particularly among the leading VCs,
is not to build unicorns, but to build
decacorns, says Toon. “It’s not about
having one [technology giant] – it’s
about having lots. For us, it’s this idea
of ‘Will people in the future buy more
CPUs or IPUs?’ They’ll buy more IPUs.
CPUs will still be there. They’ll be doing
the inputs and the outputs. They’ll be
presenting and collating the data. But
the compute will be done on IPUs.
“It’s like going back to the 1970s and
the birth of personal computers, micro-
processors, and companies like Apple
and Intel that got created at that time.
There are going to be Apples and Intels
that will be created in the AI world.
And our goal is to be one of them.” �James Silver wrote about London’s
tech scene in 05.19Below: IPUs in Graphcore’s Bristol data
centre. “Will people in the future buy more
CPUs or IPUs? They’ll buy more IPUs”09-19-FTgraphcore.indd 157 22/07/2019 14:30