Cerebras

Cerebras Systems was founded in 2015 by a team of five individuals who previously worked together at SeaMicro, an enterprise started by Andrew Feldman and Gary Lauterbach. Their vision for Cerebras stemmed from a recognition that conventional GPUs were not ideal for high-level processing in artificial intelligence. They set out to create a fundamentally new type of semiconductor, one large enough to take up an entire silicon wafer and use wafer-scale integration to significantly reduce latency and interconnect bottlenecks.

Their initial endeavor led to the development of unique cooling methods, sophisticated software to handle microscopic manufacturing defects, and a specialized machine to precisely drill thousands of screws into wafers. After years of development and substantial investment, facing the formidable challenge of integrated circuit packaging, they successfully produced their first working product in July 2019. This breakthrough resulted in the announcement of WSE-1, their first-generation Wafer-Scale Engine, and the CS-1 supercomputing system in August 2019, marking their entry into the AI hardware market.

Early adoption of Cerebras technology came from educational institutions and life-sciences companies, who utilized the supercomputers for critical research in areas like drug discovery, computational fluid dynamics, genomics, and COVID-19 research. This initial success validated their audacious approach to tackling the immense computational demands of artificial intelligence.