はじめに

この6-7年でAIチップ、特にクラウド用学習チップが行われてきました。

- SambaNova : $1132M(2021.04)、SN10 (7nm) + DDR4、SN30 (7nm、2 die + DRAM)
- Graphcore : $710M (2020.12)、MK1 (16nm)、MK2 (7nm) + IPU Gateway SoC、BoW IPU (MK2ベース)
- Cerebras : $450M (2020.11)、CS-1 (16nm)、CS-2 (7nm)
- Tenstorrent : $234M (2021.05)、Wormhole (GF 12nm?) + GDDR6、Blackhole (6nm)
- Groq : $367M (2021.04)、GroqChip1 (14nm) => GroqChip2 (HBM2)

上記のStartupの5社の資金調達額は、$2600M以上です。

ちなみに、Intelに買収された Habana の買収額は、$2B (2019.12) です。Gaudi (16nm) 買収後、Gaudi2 (7mn) を開発しています。

vengineer.hatenablog.com

now Graphcore is in trouble

下記のツイートで、Graphcore がレイオフをしたことを知りました。

The #AI chips are falling. First Mythic laid off 50% of their staff in June, now Graphcore is in trouble. The cliff to build a competitive AI chip is very high, whether its training of inference #MachineLearning https://t.co/MtPmkg06uP
— Sumit Gupta (@SumitGup) 2022年10月10日

下記の記事の方が詳しいです。

www.uktech.news

また、この記事によると、

The company has 633 employees at sites in Bristol, Cambridge, London, Munich, Oslo, Gdansk, Palo Alto, Seoul, Tokyo, Hsinchu, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
The number of jobs at risk has not been disclosed.
Graphcore made a loss of $183.5 million on sales of $5 million last year leaving the company with cash and cash equivalents of $327 million at the end of 2021. Accumulated losses at the end of 2021 were $436 million.
Two Graphcore directors raised $12.856 million net of tax from share sales last year with the highest paid director receiving $6.427 million from the share sales on top of a salary of $816,000.

Founderは、それぞれ株式売却で6.427Mドルを受け取っているので、問題ないのかな。。。