$60B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning $8M a month

Cerebras Systems is a public company that sells AI chips for inference to OpenAI and AWS. It held a blockbuster IPO on Thursday, with both co-founders becoming billionaires, and ended the week worth about $60 billion. In 2019, when the company was three years old, it was spending about $8 million a month and had incinerated nearly $200 million on one technical problem, founder and CEO Andrew Feldman told TechCrunch. Every few weeks he reported failures to the board. The company aimed to build one giant chip from an entire silicon wafer. The key challenge was packaging, which covers adhering the silicon, power, cooling, and data movement. The chips were 58 times larger and used 40 times the power of prior designs. The team used trial and error and destroyed many chips before solving the issues in July 2019. They invented a machine to secure the wafer with 40 screws at once. Feldman said the team stood stunned watching lights flash on the computer. Feldman and the founding team had previously built SeaMicro and sold it to AMD for $334 million in 2012. OpenAI discussed acquiring Cerebras before the chip worked, but talks ended. OpenAI later loaned Cerebras $1 billion secured by warrants for about 33 million shares. Cerebras agreed not to sell to certain competitors, a restriction Feldman said is temporary.