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

Those talks fell through amidst growing squabbling among the OpenAI founders, several of whom are angel investors in Cerebras. 

Today OpenAI is a customer and a partner, having loaned Cerebras $1 billion secured by warrants. Those warrants conditionally grant OpenAI about 33 million shares of Cerebras’ stock, the S-1 discloses. (33 million shares are worth over $9 billion at Friday’s closing price of $279.) 

Interestingly, Cerebras also agreed to not sell its wares to specific OpenAI competitors as part of that loan deal. Feldman wouldn’t confirm that the obvious company this involves: Anthropic. He did, however say that restriction is temporary. 

“It’s limited in time, and it was designed to make sure that we could get OpenAI the capacity,” he said.

The truth was, Cerebras hasn’t yet grown big enough to handle multiple fast-growing model makers anyway.  He likened selling AI compute capacity to an all-you-can eat buffet. Instead of trying to stuff itself on all potential customers, “We’re going to work with part of the buffet only, and we’re going to get comfortable with that, before we attack the rest,” he said.