Japanese owner of Arm gets a bargain with Graphcore purchase — could British startup stymied by lack of support embrace Arm’s licensing strategy to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI?

UK-based AI chip designer Graphcore was, for a time, considered a potential rival to Nvidia and AMD, but fell on hard times after failing to capitalize on the AI boom. 

Back in February 2024, we wrote Graphcore desperately needed to raise significant funds by May if it was to survive, and that a number of potential buyers were circling the troubled firm. These included Arm, Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank (which has a majority share in Arm), and OpenAI.