Cerebras secures $10bn OpenAI partnership before AI chipmaker IPO

AI chip giant Cerebras has signed a contract with OpenAI to provide 750 megawatts (MW) of computing capability through 2028.

According to a blog post released by the ChatGPT creator, the partnership is valued at over $10 billion.

The agreement will allow Cerebras to move beyond reliance on the United Arab Emirates' G42, which made up 87% of its revenue in the first half of 2024.

"The way you have three very large customers is start with one very large customer, and you keep them happy, and then you win the second one," Cerebras' co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman shared with CNBC in a conversation.

Cerebras has developed a massive processor capable of training and executing generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. 

This makes it a formidable competitor to Nvidia, which distributes a vast quantity of its chips to cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

In December, Groq, Cerebras' competitor, revealed that Nvidia had reached a non-exclusive licensing deal that would involve some of their staff transitioning to Nvidia.

"Cerebras adds a dedicated low-latency inference solution to our platform. That means faster responses, more natural interactions, and a stronger foundation to scale real-time AI to many more people," Sachin Katti, involved in compute infrastructure at OpenAI, stated in the blog.

The agreement followed months after OpenAI collaborated with Cerebras to ensure its gpt-oss open-weight models would operate effectively on Cerebras silicon, alongside chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.