Today, Cerebras Systems is a publicly traded company worth an astounding $60 billion, selling its powerful AI chips to tech giants like OpenAI and AWS. But in 2019, the company was on the brink of failure, spending around $8 million per month while trying to overcome seemingly insurmountable technical hurdles.

The problem Cerebras faced was revolutionary: they aimed to create a single chip that could handle the vast computational demands of AI by using an entire silicon wafer. No one had ever succeeded in this before, and as Feldman candidly stated, ‘we destroyed an enormous number of chips’.

The real breakthrough came after exhaustive failure—literally thousands of them. The Cerebras team invented their own machines to secure the massive wafers without cracking them, and finally solved the critical packaging issues that had eluded semiconductor engineers for decades.

Despite these monumental challenges, Cerebras secured a major deal with OpenAI in 2019, which eventually became a $1 billion loan, securing OpenAI's commitment not to be direct competitors. Today, Cerebras continues to focus on building strong partnerships and growing its customer base, all while reflecting on the ‘greatest moment of my life’ when the chip finally worked.