Cerebras

Cerebras Systems, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, builds the largest AI semiconductors on the planet. Their wafer-scale engine (WSE) chips use an entire silicon wafer as a single processor, a radical departure from traditional chip design that eliminates the interconnect bottlenecks that plague GPU clusters. The WSE-3, their third-generation chip, measures 215mm square, packs 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI cores, and delivers up to 125 petaflops of AI compute. Each chip draws 25kW of power and costs up to $3 million, limiting adoption to large-scale AI labs and hyperscalers.

Cerebras was founded in 2016 by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Sean Lie, Michael James, and Jean-Philippe Fricker. Feldman previously co-founded SeaMicro, a microserver company acquired by AMD in 2012. The company emerged from stealth in 2019 with the first WSE and has since released the CS-3 supercomputer and Cerebras Cloud, a service that lets customers rent compute without buying hardware. Manufacturing is handled exclusively by TSMC in Taiwan, the only foundry capable of producing wafer-scale chips.

Cerebras competes directly with Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Broadcom in hardware, and with cloud giants like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and CoreWeave in cloud services. Key customers include Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (62% of 2025 revenues), G42 (24%), OpenAI (signed a deal in 2026), and Amazon Web Services (signed in 2026). The company filed for an IPO in 2024 but withdrew in early 2025, citing market conditions. As of 2025, Cerebras is valued at $4-5 billion in private secondary markets.[edit]