Cerebras Systems is an artificial intelligence hardware company best known for building the largest computer chip in the industry, the Wafer-Scale Engine. The company was founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, and a team of veteran semiconductor engineers, with Feldman serving as CEO.
Cerebras designs wafer-scale processors that integrate hundreds of thousands of AI-optimized cores and large on-chip memory onto a single piece of silicon, eliminating much of the inter-chip communication overhead found in clusters of conventional GPUs. These chips power the CS-series systems and the Cerebras inference cloud, which delivers high-throughput, low-latency inference for large language models.
The company has raised substantial venture funding and built strategic relationships with research institutions, national laboratories, and large enterprises. It has positioned its inference service as one of the fastest available for open and frontier-class models, and it pursued a public listing as demand for AI compute accelerated.
Cerebras competes with NVIDIA and other AI accelerator and cloud providers. Its differentiators include a radically different wafer-scale architecture, simplified scaling for large models, and a strong emphasis on inference speed.
For organizations seeking very fast inference or simplified large-model training on a non-GPU architecture, Cerebras is a distinctive option, though its specialized hardware and ecosystem are narrower than the dominant GPU stack.