Firm behind ChatGPT could buy UK chipmaker Graphcore for its IPUs

The UK chipmaker Graphcore is allegedly looking for new buyers including UK’s ARM, Japan’s Softbank, and America’s OpenAI which makes the wildly popular ChatGPT. According to The Telegraph, the company is in talks for a potential deal that could help it cover heavy losses.

One of the main issues for the company is that it was forced to close its Chinese business as a result of US chip controls. Last year, the company announced that its revenues had fallen by a massive 46% and needed new funding as a result.

To date, the company has reduced staff numbers like very many other tech companies and it has closed offices that it has abroad.

If the information obtained by The Guardian is correct, the company could be worth $500 million after investors increased the value of their stakes. This valuation is a far cry from late 2020 when the company was valued at a much higher $2.8 billion.

As a bit of background if you’ve not heard of Graphcore, it has been on people’s radar since before the COVID-19 pandemic and has been developing Intelligent Processing Unit (IPU) chips to power machine learning and artificial intelligence jobs.

Speaking to ZDNET several years ago, Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon said that IPUs are able to outperform GPUs with massive parallelism and on-chip memory. They can also get AI workloads done with less energy usage which is cited as a significant problem with generative AI right now which relies on GPUs.

If OpenAI was to pick up Graphcore it could be pretty significant. It could potentially make its GPT-4 LLM much cheaper to run which could lead to lower subscription costs. It would also be helpful for the company if it wanted to host a larger next-generation LLM cost effectively.

Source: The Telegraph via City A.M.

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