UK BUSINESS AI UNIVERSE: Big tech in the UK: UK research teams

Owner or parent

Graphcore, a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp (acquired 11 Jul 2024)

Founded or opened

the lab was announced on 20 Nov 2025. Graphcore was co-founded in 2016 by Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles.

Lab director or lead

Marcus McElroy — General Manager, "at the helm" — from 31 Jul 2026

Other leaders

executive team Nick Bishop; Helen Byrne; Sally Doherty; Tim Ramsdale; Rami Sinno; John Walsh (titles not given) — Jul 2026; Nigel Toon — co-founder, stepped down as Executive Chair on 31 Jul 2026

Site and address as published

headquarters in Bristol, moving into "a purpose built global headquarters in Bristol, UK" in Sep 2026; offices in Cambridge, London, Gdansk and Hsinchu (Jul 2024)

Headcount

lab "expected to double headcount to 750 jobs" — 20 Nov 2025 — GOV.UK (single source); company "approaching 1,000 employees" — 31 Jul 2026 — graphcore.ai; 75 new jobs, a 20% rise — 7 Nov 2024 — graphcore.ai

What it does

Graphcore is a Bristol company that builds silicon, hardware and software for AI compute, owned by SoftBank since 2024. In November 2025 the UK government said Graphcore and SoftBank would open a new AI development lab in Bristol, doubling headcount there to 750. In July 2026 Graphcore said it was approaching 1,000 staff and moving to a new Bristol headquarters.

Research groups or focus

"silicon design, hardware, datacenter infrastructure, software, and AI research" (hiring areas, Nov 2024)

Notable outputs

no new outputs found; earlier chips are already on the site (GC1, GC200, Bow IPU, BowPod 1024, IPU-M2000)

Funding or budget as published

Not stated (no acquisition price or lab budget published on pages opened)

Partners named

SoftBank Group — owner — Jul 2024; SoftBank Investment Advisers (Vikas J. Parekh, Managing Partner) — quoted — Jul 2024

Uk government links

GOV.UK announcement of 20 Nov 2025 ("Graphcore and SoftBank renew their backing for the UK")

Status now

Active: Marcus McElroy has led the company since Nigel Toon stepped down on 31 Jul 2026, and Graphcore said it would move into a new Bristol headquarters in Sep 2026.

Labs Round 8 deep profile (31 Oct 2026), as the researchers wrote it; confidence: one source (lab and 750 jobs: GOV.UK only); company facts verified across Graphcore pages.

Sources

1. gov.uk/government/news/ai-to-power-national-rene
2. graphcore.ai/posts/graphcore-co-founder-and-exec
3. graphcore.ai/posts/graphcore-joins-softbank-grou
4. graphcore.ai/about
5. graphcore.ai/posts/graphcore-begins-hiring-drive

Owner or parent

Microsoft Research

Founded or opened

Not stated (not stated on the lab page)

Lab director or lead

Aditya Nori — Vice President and Lab Director — date not stated

Other leaders

Austin Donnelly — Senior Principal Research Engineer Lead; Hitesh Ballani — Partner Research Manager; Katja Hofmann — Partner Research Manager; Siân Lindley — Senior Principal Research Manager; Ted Meeds — Senior Principal Research Manager; Rachel Howard — Director Business Management & Ops

Site and address as published

21 Station Road, Cambridge, CB1 2FB; and 198 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge CB4 0AB

What it does

Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge. It designs hardware for Microsoft's cloud and AI data centres, including optical computing, storage in glass and datacentre networking and robotics. It also works on machine learning for science, industry and society, and on people-centred AI such as generative models of gameplay, tools that show where digital content comes from, and AI that helps people think.

Research groups or focus

Future AI Infrastructure; Machine Intelligence; People-Centric AI; Research Engineering

Notable outputs

WHAM (World and Human Action Models) — generative models of game worlds and player actions from the Muse programme, built with Xbox Game Studios' Ninja Theory; WHAM-RT is playable in Copilot Labs — 2025; the team moved into the Microsoft.AI product group (editor's note, 23 Sep 2026); AOC — analog optical computer for AI and optimisation workloads — date not stated; Project Silica — cloud storage written into quartz glass with femtosecond lasers — date not stated; Project Provenance — tools showing where digital content comes from — date not stated; Tools for Thought — date not stated; Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) — date not stated; Project Volano — date not stated; CRAFT (datacentre robotics) — date not stated; Project Egypt (greenhouse-gas data) — date not stated; Memora — memory representation for AI agents — 29 Jun 2026; MicroLED datacentre networking — 17 Mar 2026

Selected papers

"WHAM: World and Human Action Models" (title as listed by Microsoft) — Nature — 2025 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08600-3

Partners named

Xbox Game Studios' Ninja Theory — WHAM — 2025; Ottobock — prosthesis image dataset for AI — Jul 2026

Uk government links

Not stated on pages opened

Status now

Active: the lab's news page lists items up to 30 Jul 2026.

Labs Round 8 deep profile (31 Oct 2026), as the researchers wrote it; confidence: one source (the lab's own pages).

Sources

1. microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-resea
2. microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/adityan/
3. microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-resea
4. microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/wham/
5. microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-resea
6. blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/09/16/mic

Owner or parent

NVIDIA

Founded or opened

Not stated (an existing lab by June 2025)

Site and address as published

Bristol (no address)

What it does

An NVIDIA AI lab in Bristol. In June 2025 NVIDIA told the UK government it would expand the lab to other parts of the UK to speed up UK AI research. None of the NVIDIA pages I opened describe the lab's own work. NVIDIA's UK research links include the Isambard-AI supercomputer at the University of Bristol, the UK-LLM project with UCL and Bangor University, and compute for UK agentic-safety labs.

Research groups or focus

"to accelerate UK research in AI" (GOV.UK, Jun 2025)

Notable outputs (UK-wide, not credited to the Bristol lab)

UK-LLM — Welsh and English model with UCL and Bangor University, built on NVIDIA Nemotron — Sep 2025; electrostatics-aware foundation models with University of Cambridge researchers, using cuEquivariance — Sep 2025 (Nemotron-Personas-UK-Extended is already BIZ-LAB-7098)

Funding or budget as published

Not stated for the lab. NVIDIA committed $250m in compute donations over five years ($50m a year) to UK agentic safety and security research — 13 Oct 2026 — https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-commits-250-million-to-advance-uk-agentic-safety-and-security-research-over-the-next-five-years

Partners named

BOLD Lab (Oxford), SOFAIR Lab (UCL), Imperial College London — compute donation — Oct 2026; University of Bristol — Isambard-AI on Grace Hopper — Jul 2025; Sovereign AI Industry Forum founding members Babcock, BAE Systems, Barclays, BT, National Grid, Standard Chartered — Jun 2025

Uk government links

two MoUs with the UK government (Jun 2025): an AI talent pipeline, and university research on AI in advanced connectivity; DSIT update (10 Jun 2026): JOINER terminals in Leeds, Bristol and Edinburgh awarded NVIDIA GPU platforms

Status now

No page opened gives a 2026 update on the Bristol lab itself; NVIDIA's wider UK research activity continued with the October 2026 compute commitment.

Labs Round 8 deep profile (31 Oct 2026), as the researchers wrote it; confidence: one source (the lab itself is named only by GOV.UK).

Sources

1. gov.uk/government/news/pm-launches-national-skil
2. nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-commits-250-mi
3. blogs.nvidia.com/blog/uk-partner-ecosystem-ai-ma
4. blogs.nvidia.com/blog/uk-ai-vision/