Nvidia sits at the centre of what we’ve dubbed the AI-financial complex, but there are a lot of people that want to make bank from the market frenzy. Cerebras Systems has now filed for an IPO, and it will be an interesting test of just how AI-mad investors have become. As mainFT quoted a VC as saying in a round-up of pretenders for Nvidia’s throne last month: There has been a near insatiable desire from public investors to find and back the next Nvidia. This isn’t just about chasing the latest trend. The momentum is also benefiting several VC-funded chip start-ups that have been toiling away for nearly a decade. As a result, the valuations are appropriately punchy. Bloomberg reported last week that the Silicon Valley-based maker of chips optimised for artificial intelligence was hoping to raise $1bn at a valuation of $7bn to $8bn, for a company that was started in 2016 and only began generating any revenue in 2019. But Cerebras’s pitch is pretty transparent: by FT Alphaville’s count the summary prospectus alone contains 142 mentions “AI”. We gave up counting the rest of the S-1 filing. It’s core product is a wafer-sized chip .. . . which Cerebras says leads to vastly more memory and faster computing than with other commercially available GPUs. This enables Cerebras customers to solve problems in less time and using less power. Our AI compute platform combines processors, systems, software, and AI expert services, to deliver massive acceleration on even the largest, most capable AI models. It substantially reduces training times and inference latencies, while reducing programming complexity. We’re not even going to try to judge the tech here. FTAV is primarily a financial blog and, luckily, there’s a lot there to dig into. For example, revenues more than tripled in 2023 to $78.7mn, and climbed to $136.4mn in the first six months of 2024. But that still means the company remains deeply unprofitable, with a net loss of $66.6mn so far this year, roughly the same annualised run rate as in 2023.
Full report : Cerebras, an A.I. Chipmaker Trying to Take On Nvidia, Files for an I.P.O.
