AI chipmaker Cerebras namedropped by Oracle, alongside Nvidia and AMD
As AI chip maker Cerebras prepares for an eventual IPO, the company appears to have landed a major cloud computing customer: Seer.
In a conference call with analysts Tuesday following Oracle’s quarterly earnings, Clay Magouyrk said the The software vendor’s two CEOs noted that the company’s infrastructure includes the market leader’s graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as Cerebras chips. Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices.
“We are building infrastructure that is flexible, affordable and can support from the smallest to the largest workloads,” said Magouyrk. “We continually deliver the latest accelerators, from the latest Nvidia and AMD options to emerging designs from companies like Cerebras and Positron,” another AI hardware startup.
Cerebras offers cloud services using large-scale WSE-3 chips. The company filed paperwork for an IPO in 2024 but withdrew the application last October. Days later, the company announced a $1.1 billion financing round at an $8.1 billion valuation, and CEO Andrew Feldman said Cerebras still intends to go public.
One of the most glaring concerns in Cerebras’ original prospectus for potential investors was its reliance on a single customer based in the Middle East. Backed by Microsoft, G42 is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024.
Strengthening its customer roster with a name like Oracle could be a huge boon for Cerebras, and it would come on the heels of another major announcement earlier this year. In January, Cerebras said it had received a $10 billion commitment from OpenAI, which relies on Oracle and other companies for cloud services. The next month, OpenAI said: Collaboration with Cerebras In a research preview of Codex-Spark, a fast-acting AI model for software development for ChatGPT Pro customers.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment and there is no mention of the Cerebras option in the price list. Cerebras had no immediate comment.
Oracle’s earnings release came after the company reported better-than-expected results, removed its fiscal 2027 guidance and said remaining performance liabilities had more than quadrupled from the previous year to $553 billion.
“We are fully confident that the investments we are making now in data centers, computing capacity and customer relationships will become even more valuable over time,” Magouyrk said after naming Cerebras and other chipmakers.
As Cerebras tries to compete as a startup against the world’s most valuable company, it is playing in a market with seemingly insatiable demand for computing power as AI model developers scale to quickly respond to users’ needs.
Nvidia is using its massive cash pile to expand into new product areas. In December, the company acquired key assets of AI chip startup Groq for approximately $20 billion. Nvidia plans to announce a new architecture based on Groq at the GTC developer conference in California next week. Wall StreetJournal reported.
Magouyrk said GTC will include some “important announcements” during the meeting. He also said that rapid response to incoming demands requires innovative technologies as well as strategically located data centers.
“This is the type of hardware that is being deployed, and that’s why you’re seeing so much innovation around these AI accelerators,” he said. “If you look at what Groq is doing, or Cerebras, or Positron, you see all these different types of customers saying how can we not only reduce the cost of inference, but also significantly reduce its latency.”
WRISTWATCH: OpenAI introduces first AI model running on Cerebras chips
