According to an AnandTech report that Graphcore, an AI semiconductor start-up, has just announced that it has received US$222 million in Series E financing, demonstrating the full confidence of venture capital in this field.
It is reported that Graphcore, headquartered in Bristol, UK, has received a total of US$710 million in financing and has a surplus of US$440 million. At present, the company has developed a second-generation product, the Colossus MK2 GC 200 launched in 2020.
The Colossus MK2 GC200 chip contains 60 billion transistors, built-in 900MB of memory, and is manufactured using TSMC’s N7 process node. The chip area has reached 823 m㎡, which can achieve 250 T-Flops of AI computing power.
By compressing four-way chips and a set of ARM-based network control chips into a 1U chassis, Graphcore was able to build a giant AI computing network containing 64,000 chips.
Customers can order off-the-shelf IPU-M2000 equipment, a dedicated rack that can accommodate 16 sets of devices, and a POPLAR software stack that supports PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, and PaddlePaddle machine learning frameworks.
The latest $222 million in Series E financing is said to be led by the Teacher Pension Plan Committee in Ontario, Canada, and has attracted new investors such as Fidelity International and Schroder (previous investors include Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit).
Thanks to the US$710 million in financing so far, Graphcore has also successfully ranked second in AI chip start-ups (valuation reached US$2.77 billion), second only to the US$850 million financings of Chinese semiconductor startup Horizon Robotics. Horizon Robotics received the latest round of financing of US$150 million on December 2.
(Via)
