Today, Cerebras Systems has become a public company supplying AI chips to tech giants like OpenAI and AWS. Following a successful IPO on Thursday, the company reached a valuation of $60 billion, making its founders billionaires. However, in 2019, just three years after its founding, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. This is reported by Techcrunch.com reports .
In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Andrew Feldman recalled that they were burning $8 million per month at the time and had lost nearly $200 million in total trying to solve a technical problem. Feldman had to report another failure and massive expenditures to the board of directors each time.
The Cerebras idea seemed simple on paper: for over 50 years, the semiconductor industry has tried to speed up processors by breaking transistors into smaller pieces. However, the massive computing power required for AI necessitated connecting many chips together. The founders of Cerebras proposed the idea of turning an entire silicon wafer into one giant, powerful chip.
The biggest obstacle to realizing this idea was the "packaging" process. Mounting mega-chips produced in partnership with TSMC onto a motherboard, powering them, and creating cooling systems was not easy. Feldman noted that their chips were 58 times larger than standard ones and required 40 times more energy, and there were no ready-made solutions on the market to solve this problem.
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