Nebius vs Graphcore

By valuation, Nebius is the larger company at $25B versus $500M — a 50x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Nebius employs 1,000 people while Graphcore has 500-1000 employees.

Nebius has raised more in total funding at $2B, compared to Graphcore's $700M — a gap of $1.3B. Combined, the two companies have completed 4 known funding rounds.

Graphcore leads with an Awaira Score of 85/100, while Nebius sits at 84/100. That 1-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Graphcore was founded by Nigel Toon in 2016. Nebius's founder information is not currently available in our database.

Nebius: Nebius is a Dutch AI infrastructure company that provides full-stack AI cloud computing services, from GPU clusters to managed machine learning platforms. Originally spun out of Yandex, Nebius has established itself as a major AI infrastructure provider with strategic partnerships including a $2 billion investment from NVIDIA and a $27 billion infrastructure deal with Meta covering dedicated GPU capacity and compute resources over a five-year period. The company operates AI-optimized data centers and offers cloud services that span the entire AI stack — from bare-metal GPU access through high-level managed AI services. Nebius competes in the rapidly growing AI cloud market alongside CoreWeave, Lambda, and the major hyperscalers, differentiating through deep engineering expertise across hardware and software layers. Graphcore: Graphcore designs the Intelligence Processing Unit, a processor architecture built specifically for machine learning workloads, offering a hardware alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model training and inference. The Bristol-based company developed the IPU around a bulk synchronous parallel computation model that distributes model parameters across thousands of processor cores with local memory, achieving high efficiency for sparse and irregular neural network computations that GPUs handle inefficiently.\n\nThe company raised approximately $700 million across six funding rounds including a Series E that valued it at approximately $2.8 billion, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Microsoft, and Samsung Ventures. Graphcore processors are deployed in research institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, as well as commercial AI platforms. The company has shipped multiple IPU generations including the MK2 IPU and Bow IPU, with the Colossus processor and IPU-POD system providing data centre scale AI compute.\n\nGraphcore competes directly against NVIDIA in the AI accelerator market, alongside AMD, Intel Gaudi, and other AI chip startups including Cerebras, SambaNova, and Groq. The AI accelerator market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2027, driven by demand for model training compute. Graphcore faces the dominant position of NVIDIA and its CUDA software ecosystem as the primary barrier to adoption, requiring significant software investment to match the maturity of CUDA tooling that researchers and engineers have relied on for over a decade.

Graphcore got there first, launching in 2016 — that's 7 years of extra runway. Nebius didn't arrive until 2023. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Nebius has about 1,000 employees; Graphcore has about 500-1000. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Nebius and Graphcore compete in AI Infrastructure, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.