UK Chip Startup Fractile Expands in Bristol
Following the £100m expansion of UK chip startup Fractile in Bristol, the UK government is encouraging innovative tech businesses to invest in the UK.
The expansion will see the chip company grow its London and Bristol sites over the next three years to establish a UK industrial hardware engineering facility. Fractile also plans to expand its UK-based team to develop and optimize next-generation systems.
Founded in Oxford, the chip manufacturer claims it can rival AI acceleration chip giants with a new architecture 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. With plans to expand its team of 70 with 40 additional roles in hardware engineering, testing, semiconductor design, and software development.
Last year, Fractile gained attention from Intel’s former CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who expressed interest in investing in the startup. Gelsinger praised Fractile’s in-memory compute approach to inference acceleration, highlighting its ability to tackle bottlenecks in scaling inference and reducing power consumption.
The UK government views this expansion as a significant boost to the country’s AI hardware ecosystem. Fractile positions its technology as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs for accelerating AI inference workloads.
UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan, speaking at an event in London, called for greater British technology ownership to shape a positive future for breakthrough tech like AI. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has established the Sovereign AI Unit to harness the UK’s AI capabilities and drive economic growth.
As part of its industrial strategy, DSIT has implemented AI growth zones to attract investments into key areas in the UK. With five AI growth zones across Great Britain generating significant investment and job opportunities, the government is looking to designate additional AI growth zones.
Narayan emphasized the importance of investing in British tech innovation to maintain leadership in AI and enhance global influence.
