British chip designer Graphcore Ltd is laying off most of its staff and discontinuing sales in China, marking another setback for a start-up once heralded as a potential rival to Nvidia Corp.
The company confirmed the decision, citing recent US export controls that have focused primarily on limiting China’s access to high-end chips and other equipment used for artificial intelligence (AI).
“Regrettably, this means we will be significantly scaling back business operations in China,” a company spokesperson said in an e-mail.
Photo: Bloomberg
The company declined to share the number of employees affected.
Graphcore, founded in 2016, designs semiconductors tailored to support AI software.
Investors poured money into the start-up as they searched for a viable alternative to Nvidia, whose gear is in high demand.
In 2020, Graphcore raised US$222 million at a US$2.8 billion valuation, making it one of the UK’s most promising start-ups.
However, the Bristol, England-based company has struggled to get commercial traction.
Revenue fell 46 percent year-on-year and losses widened 11 percent to US$204.6 million last year, the firm’s most recent filing showed.
The company last month said that it needed to raise funds to keep operating.
Sequoia Capital, one of Graphcore’s most notable backers, wrote down the value of its stake in the start-up to zero, the Sunday Times reported earlier this year
Graphcore chief executive officer Nigel Toon had previously pointed to China as a potential growth market, particularly as trade restrictions have hampered Nvidia’s ability to sell into the country.
At the Bloomberg Technology conference in London last month, Toon said sales from China accounted for “maybe 20 to 25 percent” of his company’s business.
“Elsewhere, the need for AI compute continues to increase and Graphcore is working with customers around the world to meet their demand for a powerful, cost-effective alternative to GPUs,” the Graphcore spokesperson said, referring to the powerful graphics chips that Nvidia and others make.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS