Following UK chip startup Fractile’s £100m expansion in Bristol, the UK government is calling for innovative tech businesses to invest in the UK.
The expansion sees the chip company expand its London and Bristol sites over the next three years to create a UK industrial hardware engineering facility. Fractile also plans to grow its UK-based team to develop and optimise next-generation systems.
The Oxford-founded chip manufacturer claims it can take on the AI acceleration chip giants with a new kind of architecture that is capable of running trained AI models up to 50 times faster and at 10% of the cost of GPU-based AI inference.
Backed by Oxford Science Enterprises and funded by Kindred Capital and the NATO Innovation Fund, the company aims to have its AI chips ready this year. It is currently expanding its team of 70 with 40 additional roles, including hardware engineering and testing, semiconductor design and software development.
Last year, Fractile caught the attention of Intel’s former CEO, Pat Gelsigner, who posted on LinkedIn that he would be investing in the startup. In a LinkedIn post, Gelsigner said that in-memory compute approach to inference acceleration that Fractile is developing, jointly tackles the two bottlenecks to scaling inference. According to Gelsigner, the approach overcomes the memory bottleneck that holds back today’s GPUs, while decimating power consumption.
At the time, he said the role of inference performance is still under-appreciated, stating: “Being able to run any given model orders of magnitude faster, at a fraction of the cost and maybe, most importantly, with a dramatically lower power envelope provides a performance leap equivalent to years of lead on model development.”
The government sees the expansion as a significant boost to the UK’s AI hardware ecosystem. Fractile positions its technology as an alternative to Nvidia graphics processor units (GPUs) for accelerating AI inference workloads.
Announcing the investment at an event in London, UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan called for greater British technology ownership to ensure the UK can command deeper influence shaping a positive future for breakthrough tech like AI. “I am setting Britain’s AI leaders a challenge – bang the drum for startups, spread the opportunities to every corner of our country and embrace risk,” he said.
As part of its industrial strategy, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has set up the Sovereign AI Unit to build and harness the UK’s AI capabilities to unlock economic growth and enhance UK national security. The strategy also includes AI growth zones, which aim to attract investments into key areas in the UK.
A year on from announcing its AI opportunities action plan, there are now five AI growth zones across Great Britain – including two in Wales and one in Scotland – generating £28.2bn in investment, creating more than 15,000 jobs, and providing £5m of targeted funding for each zone to drive adoption at the local level. It is now looking to designate a small number of additional AI growth zones.
“By investing in British tech innovation, just as Fractile is doing today, we can reinforce our leadership in AI and boost our influence on the global stage,” Narayan added.
