Cerebras founder Andrew Feldman on the packing crates for Condor Galaxy 1, or, “CG-1,” a massively parallel AI computer built for client G42. Rebecca Lewington/Cerebras Systems
The world is starved for GPU chips from the dominant artificial intelligence vendor, Nvidia. That has so far not produced a meaningful surge in chip sales by competitors Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. But it may be helping to build a new kind of computing model.
“It’s increasingly the case that there’s, sort of, one alternative to Nvidia,” said Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of AI computing startup Cerebras Systems, which sells a massive AI computer, the CS-2, running the world’s largest chip.
Also: Nvidia boosts its ‘superchip’ Grace-Hopper with faster memory for AI
Feldman and team began selling computers to compete with Nvidia’s GPUs four years ago. A funny thing happened on the way to market. Feldman is increasingly finding his business is a hybrid one, where there are some sales of individual systems, but much larger sales of massively parallel systems that Cerebras builds over months, then runs on behalf of clients as a dedicated AI cloud computing service.
The business “has changed completely” for Cerebras, Feldman told ZDNET. “Rather than buying one or two machines, and putting a [computing] job on one machine for a week, customers would rather have it on 16 machines for a few hours” as a cloud service model.
