$60B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning $8M a month
Cerebras Systems, a company specializing in AI chips, recently went public with a valuation of approximately $60 billion. The company faced significant challenges early on, burning $8 million a month while trying to solve complex engineering problems. Despite these hurdles, Cerebras successfully developed a groundbreaking chip that has attracted major clients like OpenAI and AWS.
- ▪Cerebras Systems held a successful IPO, making its co-founders billionaires.
- ▪In 2019, the company was close to failure, having spent nearly $200 million on a technical challenge.
- ▪The team overcame significant engineering obstacles to create a powerful AI chip that is 58 times larger than typical chips.
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Today, Cerebras Systems is a public company that sells AI chips for inference to giants like OpenAI and AWS. It held a blockbuster IPO on Thursday, with both of its co-founders billionaires, and ended the week worth about $60 billion. But in 2019, when it was three years old, it came dangerously close to failure – incinerating a shocking amount of money. It was trying to solve a technical problem no one in the semiconductor industry thought could be done. “We were spending about $8 million a month,” founder CEO Andrew Feldman told TechCrunch of that period. “At this point, we had incinerated nearly $200 million trying to solve one technical problem.” Every few weeks, Feldman was forced to make the painful walk of shame to the board meeting to report another failure and more money burned.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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