Cerebras
Application Field: AI Training
Cerebras is renowned for producing massive chips. It was co-founded by Gary Lauterbach and Andrew Feldman, who previously co-founded SeaMicro, a company focused on ultra-high-density computer servers, which was acquired by AMD in 2012 for a staggering $357 million.
Cerebras' primary products are supercomputer chips and systems designed specifically for AI training and supercomputing tasks. These chips are approximately 56 times larger than standard GPUs, making them uniquely suited for high-performance workloads.
Cerebras' clients are primarily from sectors such as defense and academic research labs. The flagship CS-2 supercomputing system has been deployed at prestigious institutions like the Argonne National Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the Edinburgh University Supercomputing Center.
Despite raising up to $700 million in funding, Cerebras faces significant challenges in attracting commercial clients due to the dominant ecosystem of NVIDIA GPUs and CUDA.
In January, Cerebras announced a collaboration with Mayo Clinic, one of the top healthcare institutions in the U.S. Mayo Clinic plans to use Cerebras' computing chips and software to develop proprietary AI models based on decades of anonymized medical records and data.
Some of these models are reported to be capable of reading and writing text, such as summarizing key sections of patient records for new patients. Other models are designed to analyze complex medical images or genomic data.