Cerebras signs OpenAI contract worth over $10 billion

AI chip maker Cerebras has signed a deal with OpenAI to provide 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028, according to a Wednesday blog post by the maker of ChatGPT.

The deal is worth more than $10 billion, according to people close to the company.

The deal will help Cerebras diversify away from the United Arab Emirates’ G42, which accounted for 87% of its revenue in the first half of 2024.

“The way you have three very large customers is to start with one very large customer, satisfy them, and then get a second customer,” Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras, said in an interview with CNBC.

Cerebras has built large processors that can train and run generative artificial intelligence models. it will be a challenger NvidiaIt sells its chips in bulk to cloud providers such as . Amazon and microsoft — These companies rent graphics cards to clients by the hour. NVIDIA became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market cap in October as investors sought to capitalize on further growth in AI.

In December, Cerebras rival Groq said Nvidia had entered into a non-exclusive license agreement that would result in some employees moving to Nvidia. Groq’s cloud services are not included in the deal, but CNBC reports that the deal is worth $20 billion in cash, making it Nvidia’s biggest deal to date.

“Cerebras adds a purpose-built low-latency inference solution to our platform,” Sachin Katti, who works on compute infrastructure at OpenAI, said in a blog. “This means faster responses, more natural interactions, and a stronger foundation for extending real-time AI to more people.”

The deal comes months after OpenAI worked with Cerebras to ensure its gpt-oss open weight model runs smoothly on Cerebras silicon alongside Nvidia and Nvidia chips. advanced micro device.

OpenAI’s gpt-oss collaboration led to technical discussions with Cerebras, and the two companies signed a term sheet just before Thanksgiving, Feldman said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.

Cerebras has data centers full of its chips in the United States and abroad. Feldman said the company will continue to expand its footprint through its OpenAI efforts.

OpenAI evaluated Cerebras’ technology as early as 2017, according to emails revealed as part of a lawsuit between OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. tesla CEO Elon Musk is also the co-founder of the ChatGPT maker. Feldman said Musk tried to buy Cerebras in 2018.

“I had the impression that he was trying to buy us in the context of Tesla,” Feldman said of Musk.

Cerebras filed for an initial public offering in September 2024, and revealed that its second quarter revenue of that year was closer to $70 million, up from about $6 million in the second quarter of 2023. The company’s net loss rose to about $51 million from $26 million a year earlier.

The investment banks that participate in top technology IPOs are not typically listed in the prospectus, and the company hired auditors from outside the so-called Big Four accounting firms.

Cerebras withdrew its filings in October, days after announcing a $1.1 billion funding round that valued the company at $8.1 billion. The company said it had withdrawn the prospectus because the details were outdated.

“Given that our business has improved in a meaningful way, we have decided to exit so that we can resubmit updated financial and strategic information, including our approach to the rapidly changing AI landscape,” Feldman wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The amended application will provide a better description of the business to potential investors, he wrote. On Wednesday, he declined to discuss the timing of the new application.

Cerebras’ customer list includes Cognition, Hugging Face, and IBMand in March 2025, the company announced that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States had approved Cerebras’ request to sell its stake to G42.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the deal early Wednesday.