Cerebras Systems went public on Thursday and by the end of the week its valuation had reached about 60 billion dollars (around 55 billion euros). The company builds chips for artificial intelligence, and its clients include OpenAI and AWS. But the Cerebras story is more interesting than any IPO number - it is the story of a company that nearly died in 2019.

When Cerebras was three years old, in build phase, it was burning 8 million dollars a month. By that point it had already torched nearly 200 million dollars trying to solve an engineering problem that no one before them had solved. CEO Andrew Feldman walked into board meetings to report failures and growing losses. "We were in a situation where every month we evaporated money on something that didn't work," he said in one interview.

Cerebras's whole technical vision was radical. Instead of following the industry's five-decade pattern - smaller chips, more of them - they wanted to build one enormous chip. A whole wafer, not split into 50 separate units. On paper, the idea delivers power. In practice, no tool, no cooling system, no manufacturer worked at that scale.

Cerebras's chips were 58 times bigger and used 40 times more energy than anything else in the industry. There was no off-the-shelf cooling system. There was no off-the-shelf motherboard. The team had to invent a machine that could tighten 40 screws on a wafer simultaneously without damaging it. All these challenges had previously been dismissed by engineers at the largest chip companies.

In July 2019, it finally worked. When the packaged chip was mounted and powered on, the founding team - Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie, and Jean-Philippe Fricker - gathered in the lab. "We just stood there and stared at it," said Feldman. "It was one of the greatest moments of my life." This from a man who had previously built SeaMicro, sold to AMD for 334 million dollars in 2012.

Now the interesting part. OpenAI and Cerebras have an unusual relationship. About two years before the successful chip launch, OpenAI was in talks to buy Cerebras, a deal that collapsed over internal disputes. Today, OpenAI is both client and partner - it has given Cerebras a 1 billion dollar loan secured by warrants that conditionally grant OpenAI 33 million Cerebras shares. At Friday's price of 279 dollars per share, that's over 9 billion dollars in value, according to the company's S-1.

There's an intriguing clause in this deal - Cerebras committed not to sell to "specific competitors of OpenAI." Asked whether that meant Anthropic, Feldman didn't confirm, but said the restriction was "time-limited" and put in place to ensure OpenAI gets capacity. For now, Cerebras can't serve more than one AI company with big appetites. As Feldman himself put it: "We're going to work with one section of the smorgasbord, and we'll be comfortable with that, before we go after the rest."