As AI chip maker Cerebras prepares for an eventual IPO, the company appears to have landed a major cloud computing customer: Oracle.
In a conference call with analysts on Tuesday after Oracle’s quarterly earnings, Clay Magouyrk, one of he The software provider’s two CEOs indicated that their company’s infrastructure includes Cerebras chips, along with graphics processing units (GPUs) from the market leader. NVIDIA and rival Advanced Microdevices.
“We built an infrastructure that is flexible, fungible and can support the smallest to the largest workloads,” Magouyrk said. “We continually offer the latest in accelerators, from the latest options from Nvidia and AMD to emerging designs from companies like Cerebras and Positron,” another AI hardware startup.
Cerebras offers cloud services using its large-scale WSE-3 chips. The company filed paperwork for an initial public offering in 2024, but withdrew it last October. Days later, it announced a $1.1 billion funding round at a valuation of $8.1 billion, and CEO Andrew Feldman said Cerebras still intends to go public.
For potential investors, one of the most glaring concerns in Cerebras’ original prospectus was its reliance on a single Middle East-based client. Microsoft-backed G42 is based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and in the first half of 2024 accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue.
Bolstering its client roster with a name like Oracle could be a big boon for Cerebras, and would come after another major announcement earlier this year. In January, Cerebras said it had received a $10 billion commitment from OpenAI, which relies on Oracle and other companies for cloud services. The following month, OpenAI said it was collaborating with Cerebras on a research preview of Codex-Spark, a fast-acting AI model geared toward software development, for ChatGPT Pro customers.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment and its price list does not mention a Cerebras option. Cerebras had no immediate comment.
Oracle’s earnings call came after the company reported better-than-expected results, raised its fiscal 2027 guidance and said remaining performance obligations more than quadrupled to $553 billion from a year earlier.
“Collectively, we are confident that the investments we make now in data centers, computing capacity and customer relationships will only become more valuable over time,” Magouyrk said, after naming Cerebras and other chipmakers.
As Cerebras tries to compete as a startup against the world’s most valuable company, it is playing in a market with a seemingly insatiable demand for computing power as AI model developers scale to quickly respond to user needs.
Nvidia is using its gigantic cash pile to expand into new product areas. In December, the company bought key assets of AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion. Nvidia plans to announce a new Groq-based architecture at its GTC developer conference in California next week, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Magouyrk said on the call that GTC will present some “key announcements.” He also said the speed to respond to incoming requests requires innovative technology in addition to strategically located data centers.
“It’s the type of hardware that’s being deployed, and that’s why you’re seeing so much innovation around these AI accelerators,” he said. “If you look at what Groq or Cerebras or Positron does, all these different types of customers are saying, well, not only how do we reduce the cost of inference, but also how can we significantly reduce their latency.”
LOOK: OpenAI introduces first AI model running on Cerebras chips
