Cerebras Founder Reflects on Chip Development Journey in Podcast
In the latest episode of his podcast Uncapped, Jack Altman invited Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of wafer-scale chip company Cerebras, along with Benchmark general partner Eric Vishria, to discuss the complete journey of Cerebras from startup to scaled commercialization. The conversation covered various topics including the chip market landscape, the current state and future direction of the AI supply chain, and the role of investors in hardware companies.
Cerebras was founded by Andrew Feldman in 2015, who previously managed the business of server company SeaMicro. The company chose to directly challenge NVIDIA's dominance in the AI chip market by developing a giant AI accelerator chip known as the "Wafer Scale Engine" (WSE), with a single chip area of 46,225 square millimeters, nearly the size of a dinner plate. It employs an architecture that integrates massive computing units and on-chip SRAM storage on a single wafer, distinguishing it from the traditional GPU cluster solutions used by companies like NVIDIA.
The chip manufacturing process has continued to evolve with each generation: the second-generation product WSE-2, launched in 2021, used TSMC's 7-nanometer process, while the third-generation product WSE-3, set to launch in 2024, has upgraded to TSMC's 5-nanometer process. Official data shows its memory bandwidth reaches 21 petabytes per second (PB/s), claiming to be nearly a thousand times faster than NVIDIA's new generation Rubin chip in inference tasks.
Benchmark co-led Cerebras' $25 million Series A financing in 2016, the same year the company was founded, with Eric Vishria joining the board shortly thereafter, having been a general partner at Benchmark for only about a year and a half. It has been disclosed that Benchmark continued to invest through multiple rounds, with early shares costing about $18 million and subsequent investments totaling around $250 million, bringing the total investment to approximately $270 million.
This nearly nine-year bet will culminate on May 15, 2026, when Cerebras officially lists on NASDAQ under the ticker CBRS, with an initial valuation of $66 billion and raising approximately $5.55 billion. On its first day of trading, the stock price surged nearly 70%; at the closing price, Benchmark's shares were valued at over $5.3 billion, achieving a multiple return on its total investment. According to early prospectus disclosures, customer concentration was once a market concern, with a single customer, G42, accounting for 87% of the company's revenue. However, the company has since secured new clients such as Amazon Web Services, Meta, OpenAI, and Mistral AI, significantly diversifying its revenue structure.
From a funding flow perspective, the nearly 70% increase on Cerebras' first day of trading essentially reflects a strong scarcity premium expectation in the secondary market for "AI chip alternatives outside of NVIDIA": as leading cloud providers and model companies become its clients, the market bets that AI computing power demand has consistently exceeded the capacity that a single supplier can meet, thus willing to pay a premium for a second supplier with a differentiated architecture that has secured real large customer orders. The beneficiaries are the early investors in the hardware sector who have endured nearly nine years of high R&D investment cycles, as well as downstream cloud providers that locked in capacity and orders early, while the burden falls on traditional hardware investment institutions that previously remained cautious about Cerebras' commercialization prospects and missed the early entry window.