SRAM-heavy compute architecture promises real-time agents, extended reasoning capabilities to bolster Altman's valuation

OpenAI says it will deploy 750 megawatts worth of Nvidia competitor Cerebras' dinner-plate sized accelerators through 2028 to bolster its inference services.

The deal, which will see Cerebras take on the risk of building and leasing datacenters to serve OpenAI, is valued at more than $10 billion, sources familiar with the matter tell El Reg.

By integrating Cerebras' wafer-scale compute architecture into its inference pipeline, OpenAI can take advantage of the chip's massive SRAM capacity to speed up inference. Each of the chip startup's WSE-3 accelerators measures in at 46,225 mm2 and is equipped with 44 GB of SRAM.

Compared to the HBM found on modern GPUs, SRAM is several orders of magnitude faster. While a single Nvidia Rubin GPU can deliver around 22 TB/s of memory bandwidth, Cerebras' chips achieve nearly 1,000x that at 21 Petabytes a second.

All that bandwidth translates into extremely ...