Fractile, a London-based chipmaker, plans to invest £100 million in the UK over the next three years to scale up production of its artificial intelligence chips, according to the British government.
The investment will go toward expanding Fractile’s engineering team and building a new hardware engineering facility in Bristol, where the company will assemble its chips into complete AI systems. The site will also include a testing lab focused on software for next-generation computing technologies.
UK officials said the move highlights growing confidence in Britain’s tech sector, which the government values at more than £1 trillion, according to industry reports.
Running large AI models at a global scale
Founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin, Fractile is developing chips, systems, and software aimed at making frontier AI inference faster and more cost-effective.
While current hardware excels at training AI models, it struggles with inference, an increasingly important stage for advanced AI tasks. Its innovative approach integrates computation with memory to eliminate this bottleneck, enabling the largest AI models to run globally.
The company has entirely redesigned the inference process, from hardware to software, to significantly enhance the ability to address the most challenging AI problems.
Currently, the company employs around 80 people. The UK government sees homegrown firms like Fractile as key to reducing reliance on foreign chipmakers and keeping Britain competitive in the global AI race.
