Cerebras

Cerebras Systems is a developer of computing chips and systems dedicated to accelerating AI workloads. The company built its proprietary Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) chip from the ground up to accelerate deep learning algorithms. The second generation of WSE-2 chips (launched in April 2021) uses 850,000 cores, with each being independently programmable and optimized for the tensor-based, sparse linear algebra operations, and has a memory bandwidth of 20 petabytes per second. The third generation of WSE-3 chips (launched in March 2024) includes 4 trillion transistors organized into nearly 1 million cores. It offers double the performance of the previous generation, WSE-2, achieving a peak speed of 125 petaflops, and has a memory bandwidth of 21 petabytes per second.

The company also offers Cerebras AI Model Studio, a dedicated cloud-based pay-by-the-model computing service. It is powered by dedicated clusters of Cerebras CS-2s systems, which use the latest generation of WSE chips. The company claimed that Cerebras AI Model Studio can train 1–175 billion parameter models 8x faster than the largest publicly available AWS GPU instance (as of January 2024).

In addition, the company offers Cerebras Wafer-Scale Cluster, a deep learning computer system that delivers near-perfect linear scaling across millions of AI-optimized compute cores. It uses data parallelism technology to avoid the complexities of distributed computing on GPUs. As of January 2024, Cerbras offered two supercomputing clusters: The Condor Galaxy 1 (CG-1) and Andromeda. CG-1 comprises 64 Cerebras CS-2 systems that deliver 4 exaFLOPS of AI compute, while Andromeda comprises 16 Cerebras CS-2 systems that deliver 1 exaFLOPS of AI compute.

In September 2024, the company filed to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol 'CBRS'. However, it is expected to postpone its initial public offering (IPO) due to delays in a US national security review of UAE-based G42's minority investment in Cerebras.

Key customers and partnerships

As of January 2023, the company served customers in industries such as healthcare, pharmaceutical, energy, government, and financial services. Notable customers include AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, TotalEnergies, Argonne National Laboratory, and National Energy Technology Laboratory.

In July 2023, the company partnered with G42, the UAE-based technology holding group, to develop CG-1. It also collaborated with SURF to conduct a technology assessment of its hardware offerings to explore and accelerate computing and AI workflows. In June 2024, it partnered with Dell to develop advanced AI computing infrastructure leveraging the expertise of the two companies.

Funding and financials

In November 2021, Cerebras Systems raised USD 250 million in a Series F funding round led by Alpha Wave Ventures at a valuation of more than USD 4 billion. The funds were utilized to launch its CS-2 system to new customers, expand its presence globally, and recruitment. Furthermore, the company was reported to have been aiming to go public in 2024 with a valuation exceeding USD 4 billion.