AI chip challenger Cerebras sets sights on Europe

American AI chip startup Cerebras said Thursday that it plans to boost its computing capacity in Europe as it mounts a challenge to sector behemoth Nvidia, highlighting "extraordinary" demand on the continent.

The California-based firm currently runs three data centres outfitted with its silicon in France, Finland and Norway, with plans to reach 200 megawatts of processing power by next year.

"These are massive expansions" worth several billion dollars, chief executive Andrew Feldman told AFP on the sidelines of the Raise Summit AI gathering in Paris.


"By putting data centres across Europe... we think that we can meet all the unique European requirements" on issues like control over data, he added.

Transatlantic tensions have made many governments and firms leery of overreliance on US providers.

But just like in America, "demand is extraordinary... growing very, very quickly," for computing power to provide generative AI, Feldman said, adding that the sector's growth is "faster than we can keep up".

Founded in 2015, Cerebras has focused on chips dedicated to AI "inference".

That process, by which AI models provide a response to users' everyday prompts, has different requirements than the intensive, arduous "training" of a new AI system.

Appetite for inference-specific chips has exploded as more people have turned to AI agents, a new type of interface that can carry out tasks autonomously on users' behalf.

Agents require vastly expanded computing resources from a few companies like Cerebras, Nvidia and AMD.

The enthusiasm powered Cerebras' $5.5 billion stock market debut in the US in May, among the top 15 in the history of Wall Street.


Oversized processors:

With around 900 staff and a market capitalisation of $40 billion, Cerebras' specialty is in enormous processors known as "wafer-scale systems".

"Traditionally, chips are the size of a postage stamp, and we designed a chip the size of a dinner plate," Feldman said.

"In AI, big chips process information more quickly... that means when you type a question into your AI, you get an answer back more quickly," he added.

Using wafer-scale chips can reduce the slowdown and errors that can occur in traditional systems when multiple small processors have to be linked together.

Among Cerebras' European clients are British pharma giant GSK, high-performance data centres in Scotland and Germany, and software developers.

In the first quarter, the company signed a huge contract with OpenAI, estimated at over $20 billion.

Cerebras will provide computing power to the ChatGPT creator until at least 2028.

It has also recently signed a partnership with global cloud leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cerebras chief Feldman rejects the idea that the AI sector is in a bubble as ever-more-outrageous sums of money are ploughed into the technology.

"Historically in bubbles, people built things hoping customers would come. Now it's the opposite, customers want it and there's not enough supply," he said.

"I think that we're just beginning to see the productive benefits of AI".