The new supercomputer, made by the Silicon Valley start-up Cerebras, was unveiled as the A.I. boom drives demand for chips and computing power.
By Yiwen Lu
Reporting from Santa Clara, Calif.
Inside a cavernous room this week in a one-story building in Santa Clara, Calif., six-and-a-half-foot-tall machines whirred behind white cabinets. The machines made up a new supercomputer that had become operational just last month.
The supercomputer, which was unveiled on Thursday by Cerebras, a Silicon Valley start-up, was built with the company’s specialized chips, which are designed to power artificial intelligence products. The chips stand out for their size — like that of a dinner plate, or 56 times as large as a chip commonly used for A.I. Each Cerebras chip packs the computing power of hundreds of traditional chips.
Cerebras said it had built the supercomputer for G42, an A.I. company. G42 said it planned to use the supercomputer to create and power A.I. products for the Middle East.
“What we’re showing here is that there is an opportunity to build a very large, dedicated A.I. supercomputer,” said Andrew Feldman, the chief executive of Cerebras. He added that his start-up wanted “to show the world that this work can be done faster, it can be done with less energy, it can be done for lower cost.”
Demand for computing power and A.I. chips has skyrocketed this year, fueled by a worldwide A.I. boom. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta and Google, as well as myriad start-ups, have rushed to roll out A.I. products in recent months after the A.I.-powered ChatGPT chatbot went viral for the eerily humanlike prose it could generate.
But making A.I. products typically requires significant amounts of computing power and specialized chips, leading to a ferocious hunt for more of those technologies. In May, Nvidia, the leading maker of chips used to power A.I. systems, said appetite for its products — known as graphics processing units, or GPUs — was so strong that its quarterly sales would be more than 50 percent above Wall Street estimates. The forecast sent Nvidia’s market value soaring above $1 trillion.
“For the first time, we’re seeing a huge jump in the computer requirements” because of A.I. technologies, said Ronen Dar, a founder of Run:AI, a start-up in Tel Aviv that helps companies
