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. It was founded with an idea that was simple on paper. The microprocessor industry had spent its entire 50+ years making CPUs faster and cheaper by cramming more transistors onto a silicon wafer and dicing wafers into ever tinier pieces. But AI required so much compute power, many chips had to be strung together and then forced to communicate with each other. Cerebras' founders believed turning a whole, even bigger wafer into one giant, powerful chip, would work faster. The problem was, no one had ever successfully done this before,...
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