Cerebras

An upstart supplier of AI chips secured a major customer. Cerebras, which competes with Nvidia in hardware for training large models, signed a $100 million contract with Abu Dhabi tech conglomerate G42. The deal is the first part of a multi-stage plan to build a network of supercomputers.

A new computing cluster delivers more bang per chip. Cerebras unveiled Andromeda, a supercomputer based on its processors. Unlike conventional clusters, the system’s processing speed rises linearly with additional processors.

The hardware that runs the latest AI systems faces rising uncertainty as models grow larger and more computationally intensive. The U.S. Commerce Department sounded an alarm over bottlenecks in the availability of semiconductor chips.

The trend toward ever-larger models crossed the threshold from immense to ginormous. Google kicked off 2021 with Switch Transformer, the first published work to exceed a trillion parameters, weighing in at 1.6 trillion.

Billions of dollars invested to create novel AI hardware will bear their early fruit in 2020. Google unleashed a financial avalanche with its tensor processing unit in 2017.

Silicon Valley startup Cerebras shifted out of stealth mode to unveil its flagship product: an enormous chip designed from the ground up to accelerate neural networks.