Cerebras, the supplier of wafer-scale AI processors, has filed for an IPO for the second time after it cancelled such plans due to its ties with G42, an Abu Dhabi-based AI company backed by sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, last year. Financial results disclosed as part of the filing reveal that Cerebras appears to be one of the fastest-growing AI hardware companies right now. However, 86% of its revenue comes from two customers, and the company is bleeding money.
Cerebras positions itself as an AI infrastructure company, not just a maker of AI accelerators. Indeed, Cerebras designs a full stack: wafer-scale engine (WSE, literally a full silicon wafer turned into one processor), systems, and software, delivered as rack-scale systems. While Nvidia sells everything from AI GPUs to fully built rack-scale solutions, Cerebras only sells systems. Because WSE packs around 900,000 compute cores, 44 GB of on-chip SRAM, and 21 PB/s of on-chip bandwidth, its architecture by definition avoids an inter-chip communication bottleneck. Essentially, Cerebras trades system complexity for silicon complexity. There is a major weakness: wafer-scale chips are notoriously hard to yield, though WSE features plenty of redundant cores and memory cells to maximize yields.
