With effect from Friday 31 July 2026 I will step down from my role as Executive Chair at Graphcore, the company I co-founded together with Simon Knowles back in July 2016.
In the US they start tech companies in a garage, but Simon and I were more sensible. It was over lunch at the Marlborough Tavern Pub in Bath, UK, back in January 2012 that we started to work on the idea for what would become Graphcore. From 2012 to 2014 we travelled the world meeting with all of the early pioneers in artificial intelligence, many of whom became friends-and-family investors in the company, and between 2014 and 2016 we started to build the incredible Graphcore team.
We identified a number of key features that would become fundamental in building specialist processors for AI:
- A highly parallel processor with an exchange-fabric that would suit the complex deep neural-networks that were just starting to appear in research papers.
- Processor cores that featured dense tensor MatMul processing units to accelerate the complex maths required in AI along with highly capable vector units that would support all of the emerging AI workloads.
- As much on-chip memory as we could fit to provide much higher memory bandwidth and reduce energy consumption compared to any conventional CPU or GPU.
- A native graph-execution parallel programming methodology, which ultimately is why we called the company Graphcore.
All of these breakthrough innovations have become absolutely fundamental in processing AI, and many of these features can now be found in the latest GPU’s – but it was Graphcore that led the way.
Our first chip – the Graphcore Colossus™ MK1 (named after the world’s very first electronic computer built at Bletchley Park in the UK) shipped to our first customer, Microsoft, in 2018. At the time this GC1 device, with over 1,200 processor cores and 23.6-billion transistors, was the world’s most complex CMOS chip. Our software tools, called Poplar™, were the world’s first graph execution software framework which we built to interface with the new TensorFlow and PyTorch AI software tools that were just starting to emerge.
Over just a few years we raised over $600m in equity funding for the company and our technology was installed at customers around the world. In 2023 Graphcore entered into a close partnership with SoftBank Corporation and SoftBank acquired the business in summer 2024.
Since then Graphcore has continued to go from strength to strength. The company is now approaching 1,000 employees and has opened major new development centres in Austin Texas, USA and in Bengaluru, India. The company has also expanded at all its other key sites in Taipai and Hsinchu City, Taiwan, in Gdańsk, Poland, in Cambridge and London, UK and in September this year the company will move into a purpose built global headquarters in Bristol, UK.
Graphcore has become one of the leading technology companies in the UK and is still leading the charge in AI hardware as part of the SoftBank Group.
It is amazing to see what the Graphcore team has been able to deliver and I am very proud to have helped along the way, and together with Simon, to have been responsible for founding this incredible global company. I now leave Graphcore in safe hands with Marcus McElroy at the helm, supported by his incredible executive team of Nick Bishop, Helen Byrne, Sally Doherty, Tim Ramsdale, Rami Sinno and John Walsh.
But we need many more companies like Graphcore here in the UK and Europe. And so with the experience that I have gained from helping to build incredible businesses like Icera (bought by Nvidia), Altera (which went IPO and became a Fortune 500 company), as well as Graphcore, I have now co-founded BlankPage Capital, a new venture capital firm which will focus on supporting amazing deep-tech semiconductor and AI companies to help them grow and to scale. That new journey has already started but I will continue to help and support Graphcore from the side-lines, and I will be working hard to help drive much more economic growth here in the UK.
