SoftBank invests another $457 million! Graphcore receives heavy backing from Masayoshi Son, targeting general artificial intelligence

SoftBank Group is accelerating its AI hardware infrastructure rollout, and its UK chip company Graphcore has recently received a new round of major funding.

According to CNBC, the filing Graphcore submitted to the UK Companies House on April 10 shows that the company issued an additional share valued at $457 million. A Graphcore spokesperson confirmed that the related funds came from SoftBank. Sources with knowledge of the matter said that this round of investment is only “a portion” of the funding SoftBank plans to provide to Graphcore this year, and that additional, larger-scale funding will follow.

This new injection further strengthens SoftBank’s strategic layout in the global AI infrastructure sector. In recent years, SoftBank has cumulatively invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the AI track. Increasing its commitment to Graphcore is seen as a key move for SoftBank to build its own AI chip capability landscape, aiming at general artificial intelligence.

Graphcore: From a unicorn dilemma to being embraced by SoftBank

Graphcore is a UK-based AI chip and systems R&D company that was once seen as a potential challenger to Nvidia. Although the company had previously raised several hundred million dollars in total, it has consistently failed to achieve large-scale commercial deployment.

In 2024, SoftBank completed its acquisition of Graphcore. At the time, SoftBank said that Graphcore would work with the group to jointly advance the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with the goal of achieving AI capabilities at or beyond human levels. SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son once described Graphcore as having “deep professional experience in chip design,” adding that this would further solidify Arm’s leadership in semiconductor IP.

Backed by SoftBank’s funding, Graphcore’s business expansion has noticeably accelerated. In October 2025, the company announced that it would invest up to 1 billion pounds in Bangalore, India, to build a new AI park. At the same time, Graphcore is hiring at large scale across multiple areas including AI, chips, software, and systems engineering.

This investment of more than $450 million, together with additional funding that will still be provided going forward, will offer critical support for Graphcore’s technology R&D and capacity expansion. The UK chip company, which had once fallen into difficulty, is using this opportunity to reclaim a place in the global AI arms race.

SoftBank’s AI chip strategy map

Graphcore is not SoftBank’s only move in the semiconductor field.

As early as 2016, SoftBank acquired a majority stake in Arm. Arm went public on Nasdaq in 2023 and remains one of the world’s most important chip architecture licensing providers. In 2025, SoftBank made another move by acquiring chip design company Ampere Computing, further strengthening its chip industry chain layout.

At a broader level of AI infrastructure, SoftBank has participated in the “Stargate” project jointly initiated with OpenAI and Oracle, committing an investment amount of up to 500 billion dollars. According to Bloomberg, SoftBank is currently also in talks to build a large AI data center project in France.

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