Cloud company HyperAI has accused Graphcore of unfair play, claiming that the British chip designer has reneged on partnership deals and denied selling HyperAI a piece of its hardware.
Speaking to DCD, co-founder and CEO of HyperAI, Andrew Foe, said that the company had discussed whether they should just cut their losses but ultimately decided that the whole situation was just 'too absurd' to walk away from.
Foe initially chose to break his silence via a post on LinkedIn last week titled ‘My personal story on how HyperAI got cheated’ in which he outlined the allegations against Graphcore.
These include reneging on a partnership by claiming exclusivity with another European cloud provider; telling HyperAI it couldn’t provide it with previously offered technical support due to Graphcore firing a lot of its engineers; and ultimately trying to claim that it never sold HyperAI one of its products, despite the company having already received it.
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Amsterdam, HyperAI aims to offer AI capabilities to businesses across Europe, with a focus on data sovereignty and specialist support. The company claims to leverage cutting-edge technology, including Nvidia GPUs and renewable energy sources, to support fields ranging from generative AI to robotics.
The company first approached Graphcore in February of 2021 having decided it wanted to support a fellow startup. Graphcore’s technology is said to compare favorably to Nvidia’s, with a Towards Data Science article from 2022 claiming its Bow IPUs can outperform Nvidia’s A100 GPU at certain AI workloads.
A year later, those conversations progressed and Foe gave a presentation to Graphcore detailing HyperAI’s proposed cloud offering, placing an order for the Graphcore BOW POD16 in April of 2022.
This is when he said the first red flags started to appear, as the BOW POD16 didn’t ship until August and then, when it did eventually arrive, Graphcore had configured it incorrectly. These problems meant HyperAI couldn’t officially launch until December 2022. Despite the delays, all seemed fine, with Graphcore employees that HyperAI had previously engaged with reposting the company’s launch on LinkedIn.
Designed to support scale-up and scale-out machine intelligence compute, the BOW POD16 processor consists of 16 Bow IPUs, four Bow 2000 machines, and 14.4GB in in-processor memory, to provide 5.6 petaflops of FP16 performance.
However, in January 2023, things took a turn for the worse and the company started engaging in what Foe called “crazy talk.”
Graphcore’s channel manager reached out to say management was asking questions about why HyperAI was positioning itself as a cloud partner of Graphcore when Graphcore already had an exclusive cloud partner in Europe, G-Core.
Foe said from his very first conversations with Graphcore, it was made very clear that HyperAI was a cloud company, and at no point had anyone from Graphcore mentioned this would cause issues or that the company had entered into an exclusive European cloud partnership with G-Core.
Foe said he later found out that Graphcore’s VP of sales, whom the company had been engaged in conversation with since the beginning and was also the boss of the aforementioned channel manager, left the company to join G-Core.
Graphcore’s CEO Nigel Toon then became involved, initially trying to smooth things over before telling Foe that Graphcore probably wouldn’t be able to give them the necessary technical support because the company had fired a lot of its engineers.
In late February 2022, Graphcore told HyperAI that it wouldn’t engage in any further conversations without an attorney present. HyperAI decided to file a lawsuit and it was as part of that correspondence that Graphcore tried to deny selling HyperAI its BOW POD16, instead claiming that the company had bought some component parts from a third-party distributor.
“I come from a corporate background so [when we launched HyperAI] we didn't take any funding,” Foe said. “I spent a lot of my savings on a bet on Graphcore and then it just left me hanging.”
The litigation is still ongoing and HyperAI has since signed up to be an Nvidia partner.
In October 2023, Graphcore’s 2022 financial statements revealed the company had made pre-tax losses of £161 million ($204m), with revenue dropping 46 percent to £2.1m ($2.7m), approximately one percent of the losses it posted.
“I talked to a lot of people [before posting about what happened],” Foe said. “It's a little political, I guess, but with the rumors that they may be bought, I thought I just have to bring the story out because it's so absurd.”
In response to the allegations, Graphcore said: "Graphcore does not comment on pending litigation matters, other than to state that we vigorously dispute HyperAI’s meritless claims."
