UK-based chipmaker Graphcore made $4m in revenue in 2023, according to its latest company accounts, filed on Friday — three months on from its $600m+ acquisition by SoftBank.
It’s a small increase from the $2.7m the company made the year before, but way short of the $1bn founder and CEO Nigel Toon said Graphcore would hit by 2024, back in 2019.
Losses before tax, meanwhile, fell to £131m by the end of 2023, compared to $197m the previous year. The company had a $69m cash balance.
The accounts state that 2023 was a “challenging year” for the company.
Graphcore was forced to close operations in China due to “export control rules” that imposed restrictions on products being sold into the country, and “scale[d] back” operations in the US.
Developing artificial general intelligence
Graphcore’s tie up with SoftBank came on the back of a turbulent time at the chipmaker.
A landmark deal with Microsoft falling through and struggles to gain commercial traction caused investors to write down stakes in the company over the past couple of years.
The UK-based startup said in its accounts it will “continue to operate as an independent company…working closely with the SoftBank Group to advance AGI (artificial general intelligence)”.
Graphcore’s chips are designed to be specialised for training AI models, but have not yet gained mainstream use in the industry.
SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son has previously said that he believes AGI will come within 10 years — and is increasingly making big money bets on AI companies to be the first to get there.
“Graphcore and SoftBank Group share a common vision of the transformative power of artificial intelligence and the need for new compute technologies to accelerate Al innovation towards the goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI),” Graphcore said in its accounts.
Going forward, SoftBank has provided a “non-binding letter of support, stating its intention to continue to support” Graphcore for “at least 12 months” from September 2024, the accounts stated.
The company’s headquarters will remain in Bristol, with other offices in Cambridge and London in the UK, Gdansk in Poland and Hsinchu in Taiwan.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/graphcore-company-accounts-2023-news/
