From NVIDIA Rival to Key Player for SoftBank: Graphcore Secures New Major Funding

SoftBank, according to documents filed with Companies House in the UK, has made a capital injection of approximately $457 million into Graphcore, a British startup specializing in the development of accelerators for artificial intelligence and high-performance systems. The operation, reported by CNBC, was recorded on April 10 through the issuance of a single share equivalent to the total investment. A spokesperson for Graphcore confirmed that the funds come directly from SoftBank. According to sources close to the agreements between the two companies, the funding would represent only a portion of the resources that SoftBank plans to allocate to Graphcore over the course of the year.

Graphcore was acquired by the Japanese conglomerate in 2024, after years of commercial difficulties. The British company had initially been marked as a potential alternative to NVIDIA in the AI accelerator market due to its IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) architecture, but it failed to convert the strong initial interest into significant adoption among hyperscalers and large enterprise customers. With the acquisition, SoftBank declared its intention to leverage Graphcore's expertise in developing technologies related to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), a field on which the group led by Masayoshi Son is focusing an increasing part of its industrial strategies.

In recent years, SoftBank has significantly increased its investments in artificial intelligence, both through direct stakes and infrastructure. Among the most relevant initiatives is its involvement in the $500 billion Stargate project, developed alongside OpenAI and Oracle for the construction of large computational infrastructure dedicated to AI.

At the same time, the Japanese group is reportedly working on creating an independent company focused on AI and robotics to be listed in the United States, while discussions are ongoing regarding a large project for an AI data center in France.

The investment in Graphcore also fits into a broader strategy aimed at consolidating SoftBank's control along the entire semiconductor supply chain. After the acquisition of Arm Holdings in 2016 and the company's return to the stock market in 2023, SoftBank has also announced the acquisition of Ampere Computing in 2025.

Masayoshi Son had described Graphcore as a reality with "deep expertise in chip design," highlighting the potential synergies with Arm in the field of semiconductor intellectual property. Meanwhile, Graphcore continues to expand its operational activities. Last October, the company announced an investment plan of up to 1 billion pounds for a new AI campus in Bengaluru, with hundreds of hires expected in various sectors.