Aiming to make smarter cars, BMW buys stake in machine intelligence company

By CARSIFU | 24 December 2018


SAN FRANCISCO: BMW is investing in a machine intelligence company whose expertise it hopes to use in data centres and its cars.

The funding in two-year-old Graphcore was made through BMW subsidiary i Ventures BMW did not disclose details of the investment but Graphcore said the Munich car maker and Microsoft were some of the investors that helped it raise US$200mil (RM837mil) in the latest funding round.

Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) is the first processor to be designed specifically for Machine Intelligence and delivers higher speeds compared to conventional hardware.

“The versatility of Graphcore’s IPU – which supports multiple machine learning techniques with high efficiency – is well-suited for a wide variety of applications from intelligent voice assistants to self-driving vehicles,” said Tobias Jahn, Principal at BMW i Ventures.

“With the flexibility to use the same processor in both a data center and a vehicle, Graphcore’s IPU also presents the possibility of reductions in development times and complexity.”

Graphcore has raised over US$300m in funding and is based in Bristol, UK, with offices in London, Oslo, Beijing and Palo Alto in the United States.

The BMW investment is a further step towards meeting the company’s ambition to build a global technology company, focused on this new and fast-growing machine intelligence market.


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