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

AI chip darling Cerebras Systems held a blockbuster IPO on Thursday, with its stock jumping significantly to end its first week of trading at a $60 billion valuation. The company, which specializes in massive, wafer-scale chips designed specifically for AI inference, has successfully transitioned from a high-burn startup to a major public player supplying giants like OpenAI and AWS.

CEO Andrew Feldman reflected on the company's early days, revealing that Cerebras almost failed in 2019 while spending $8 million a month to solve unprecedented semiconductor engineering challenges. The success of the IPO validates Cerebras's approach of building giant, integrated chips rather than stringing together thousands of smaller components. As the AI hardware race intensifies, Cerebras is now positioned as a primary alternative to Nvidia for firms seeking high-efficiency inference capabilities at scale.