As AI chipmaker Cerebras angles for an eventual IPO, the company appears to have landed a significant cloud-computing customer: Oracle.
On a conference call with analysts on Tuesday following Oracle’s quarterly earnings, Clay Magouyrk, one of the software vendor’s two CEOs, indicated that his company’s infrastructure includes Cerebras chips, alongside graphics processing units (GPUs) from market leader Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices.
“We build infrastructure which is flexible, fungible, and can support the smallest workloads up to the largest,” Magouyrk said. “We continually offer the latest in accelerators, from the most recent Nvidia and AMD options to emerging designs from companies like Cerebras and Positron,” another AI hardware startup.
Cerebras offers cloud services that employ its large-scale WSE-3 chips. The company filed paperwork for an IPO in 2024 but withdrew the filing 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 prospective investors, one of the most glaring concerns from Cerebras’ original prospectus was its reliance on a single customer based in the Middle East. G42, backed by Microsoft, is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and in the first half of 2024, it accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue.
Bolstering its client roster with a name like Oracle could be a big boon for Cerebras, and it would follow another significant 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 next 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 didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and its price list does not mention a Cerebras option. Cerebras didn’t immediately provide a comment.
Oracle’s earnings call came after the company reported better-than-expected results, lifted its fiscal 2027 guidance and said remaining performance obligations more than quadrupled to $553 billion from a year earlier.
“Altogether, we are confident that the investments we make now in data centers, compute capacity and customer relationships will only grow more valuable over time,” Magouyrk said, after naming Cerebras and other chipmakers.
While Cerebras is trying to compete as an upstart against the world’s most valuable company, it’s playing in a market with seemingly insatiable demand for computing power as AI model developers scale to quickly respond to the needs of users.
Nvidia is using its mammoth cash pile to expand into new product areas. In December, the company bought key assets from AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion. Nvidia plans to announce a new architecture drawing on Groq at its GTC developer conference in California next week, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Magouyrk said on the call that GTC will feature some “key announcements.” He also said that speed in responding 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 going on around these AI accelerators,” he said. “If you look at what Groq does, or Cerebras or Positron, all of these different types of customers are saying, well, not only how do we reduce the cost of inferencing, but also, how can we significantly reduce the latency of it?”
WATCH: OpenAI unveils first AI model running on Cerebras chips
