Cerebras' $5.5 Billion IPO Puts Nvidia Rivalry In Focus

About this update from Cerebras Systems Inc.

Cerebras Systems is trying to turn the AI chip race into something bigger than a one-company story. The newly public AI chipmaker plans to work with a broad range of data center component suppliers, while deliberately leaving Nvidia NASDAQ:NVDA outside that circle. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Feldman said at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco that Cerebras is working with all members of the community on using other companies' parts for some parts of the AI infrastructure problem, and its own technology for others. When asked about Nvidia, his answer was blunt: Everybody but them.That strategy is already showing up in Cerebras' agreement with Amazon.com NASDAQ:AMZN, where its products will run alongside AWS's in-house chips inside Amazon data centers. The Amazon partnership, combined with Cerebras' deal to supply OpenAI, helped push the Sunnyvale, California-based company into the center of the AI hardware spending boom before its public listing. Feldman described that stretch as a pretty good 90-day run leading into the offering. Last month, Cerebras raised $5.5 billion in the year's largest IPO to date, and its shares surged on the first day of trading.For investors, the key question is whether Cerebras can become a serious alternative architecture in AI computing, not merely another chip supplier chasing Nvidia. Its wafer-scale processors are unusually large, designed to store and process major amounts of data without needing as much help from other components. The company says systems built on its chips are faster at inference, the stage where trained AI models respond to new data. But that same unusual design means Cerebras chips do not fit into standard computer hardware, forcing the company to build its own systems and operate a network of AI processing data centers. Feldman also offered a warning for the broader data center buildout, saying some operators raced ahead, angered local communities, and could have done more to share resources and explain the benefits of new facilities.

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