Cerebras Systems went public this Thursday and ended the week with an estimated value of 60 billion dollars. The two co-founders are billionaires, and their chips are being sold to OpenAI and AWS. But in 2019, when the company was only three years old, it was burning eight million dollars a month and was one step away from bankruptcy.

The idea was simple on paper. The microprocessor industry has spent decades making CPUs faster by routing more transistors onto a silicon wafer, cutting it into small pieces and then linking them together in groups. AI demanded so much compute that chips were being chained into deep configurations - then forced to communicate with each other. Cerebras wanted to make a single giant wafer act as one enormous chip. Nobody had managed it before. Nobody.

Once they had cracked the design and manufacturing phase with TSMC, the team ran into a wall: packaging. What happens once the silicon is made? How do you stick it to the motherboard? How do you give it power? How do you cool it? How do data go in and come out? The Cerebras chips were 58 times bigger than standard ones and used 40 times more energy than anything before them.

„We destroyed an enormous number of chips”, recalls Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO. To fasten the chip to the board without breaking it, they had to invent their own machine that turns 40 screws at the same time. Every few weeks, Feldman had the embarrassing walk into the board meeting to announce another failure and another pile of burned cash.

In July 2019 - it finally worked. They put the computer together, switched it on, and the entire founding team stood in the lab staring at it. „Watching a computer work is about as exciting as watching paint dry. But we stood there watching the lights blink, in shock that we'd actually cracked it.”

Today OpenAI is both buyer and partner. It lent Cerebras 1 billion dollars with warrants - which conditionally give OpenAI around 33 million Cerebras shares, worth over 9 billion dollars on Friday. Part of the deal: Cerebras isn't allowed to sell to certain OpenAI competitors. Feldman won't confirm the obvious name - Anthropic - but says the restriction is temporary.

The Cerebras story isn't a story of genius. It is a story of stubbornness and brute force. Seven years of burning cash and wrecking chips. Put differently: classic Silicon Valley success - not elegant, not visionary, just that particular form of technological pig-headedness that makes the difference between 60 billion and zero.