Big money, big chips.
From Bloomberg, February 4:
AI chip provider Cerebras Systems Inc. has raised about $1 billion in a new funding round, bolstering the company’s efforts to compete with Nvidia Corp.
The financing values the firm at $23 billion, including the money raised, cementing it as one of the most valuable closely held firms ahead of an expected IPO. The funding was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from other investors, including Benchmark, Fidelity Management & Research Co., and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Cerebras is part of a growing crop of companies vying to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the market for AI chips. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Feldman claims his hardware runs AI models multiple times faster than Nvidia systems. He also offers remote computing services to customers such as Meta Platforms Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Mistral AI.
Last month, OpenAI reached a multiyear deal to use hardware from Cerebras for 750 megawatts’ worth of computing power, in order to get quicker response times when running AI models. The infrastructure will be built in multiple stages “through 2028” and hosted by Cerebras. The deal is worth more than $10 billion, people familiar with the matter said at the time....
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Most recently, January 15:
Chips As Big As Your Head: Cerebras Does Deal With OpenAI For $10 Billion+ In Computing Power
That's our usual description of Cerebras. Where Nvidia uses smaller chips with ultrafast connections, Cerebras users the whole silicon wafer and eliminates the need for many of the connections completely.
Here's an August 2019 post: Artificial Intelligence: The World's Largest Chip Is As Big As Your Head and Contains 1.2 Trillion Transistors
And a picture from 2020's "Cerebras’ Giant Chip Will Smash Deep Learning’s Speed Barrier"
Computers using Cerebras’s chip will train these AI systems in hours instead of weeks
