$60B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning $8M a month

Today, Cerebras Systems is a public company that sells AI chips for inference to giants like OpenAI and AWS. It held a blockbuster IPO on Thursday, with both of its co-founders billionaires, and ended the week worth about $60 billion. But in 2019, when it was three years old, it came dangerously close to failure – incinerating a shocking amount of money. It was trying to solve a technical problem no one in the semiconductor industry thought could be done.