Cerebras risked it all on dinner plate-sized AI accelerators a decade ago. Today it’s worth $66 billion

Cerebras Systems has done what many chip startups aspire to but few ever achieve. On Thursday, the company and long-time Nvidia rival raised $5.55 billion in an initial public offering (IPO), making the company worth more than $66 billion on its first day of trading.

The milestone didn’t happen overnight. It took more than a decade, a radically different approach to chipmaking, and two separate attempts at an IPO to pull off.

Founded in 2015 by former SeaMicro head Andrew Feldman, Cerebras Systems' first chips looked nothing like GPUs or AI accelerators of the time.

The bet that put Cerebras on the map

At the time, most high-end GPUs used dies measuring roughly 800 square mm that’d been cut from a larger wafer. Eight or more of these GPUs would typically be stitched together by high-speed interconnects, like NVLink, which allowed them to pool their resources and ...