Bristol's machine learning chipmaker Graphcore bought by SoftBank

Bristol's Graphcore, which makes artifical intelligence (AI) chips, has been bought by Japan's investment titan SoftBank for an undisclosed sum, it emerged on Friday.

It is the latest UK tech company to be bought by SoftBank, which acquired in 2016, the Cambridge-based chip designer Arm for £24 billion.

Graphcore will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank and continue to operate under the Graphcore name.

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Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon said: "This is a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, as well as a great outcome for our company.

"Demand for AI compute is vast and continues to grow. There remains much to do to improve efficiency, resilience, and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI. In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology."

Vikas J. Parekh, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, added: "Next generation semi-conductors and compute systems are essential in the AGI journey, we’re pleased to collaborate with Graphcore in this mission."

The deal has been seen as a continuation of the Tokyo-based company's push into AI technology and also comes after the British firm had reportedly faced an uncertain future.

Graphcore designs and makes processers and software tools, which support new developments in machine intelligence.