
SoftBank acquired U.K. semiconductor company Graphcore, which specializes in artificial intelligence. The acquisition was announced on July 11, 2024, but the specific details of the contract and the acquisition price have not been disclosed6.

Graphcore was valued at just shy of $3 billion in late 2020.

Graphcore's "intelligence processing unit" (IPU) is designed for AI workloads, specifically accelerating computation in machine learning models. It has a different architecture compared to traditional graphics processing units (GPUs), focusing on large-scale parallel processing and efficiently executing complex machine learning models where the model and data are tightly coupled.