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Cerebras AI Build-Out in Texas

1:03:57 recording · EN · 3 speakers

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Brief overview

Demand for AI compute is booked years ahead, and reasoning at scale is where the value lands.

  1. Demand is booked, not speculativeFeldman's $25 billion backlog and pre-completion chip orders mean the constraint is supply of data centers and hardware, not customer appetite.
  2. Reasoning is inference, so speed compoundsReasoning burns huge internal token counts, so a 15x faster machine turns a 24-hour run into weeks or months of thinking.
  3. Open source buys control, not just costRegulated and sovereignty-minded buyers want on-prem models they own, and today the choice is OSS 120B or Chinese models.
Executive Summary AI
  • Andrew Feldman describes a build-out without precedent: data centers that in the next several years will use more power than the previous 50 years on earth took, individual buildings the size of football fields drawing more power than midsize cities, going up across the US, Canada, the Nordics, France, the Middle East, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Armenia.2:22
  • Cerebras carries a $25 billion backlog and buyers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX AI and Google order chips before they are finished, so the industry is chasing demand already booked rather than betting that it will appear.3:50
  • On the pace of improvement, Feldman notes every processor before Cerebras followed Moore's law at roughly a doubling every 18 months, while he expects his newer architecture to be way over 2X in the next 18 months because early architectures still have room a 20-year-old GPU design does not.13:16
  • The second half turns to Robin Rombach, who started Black Forest Labs two years ago in Freiburg and San Francisco after inventing latent diffusion as a PhD student in Munich and building stable diffusion on it, and is now training multimodal models on images, video and audio that add action prediction so the same model can run on a robot.41:55
  • Rombach says production use is arriving, and Jason cites Gal Gadot's Bitcoin movie shot on a soundstage with generative scenery instead of green screens for a $30 million budget she said would otherwise have cost $150 million and never been greenlit.53:03
Key Quote
“And so, you know, we have a $25 billion backlog.”
— Andrew Feldman3:50
Key Quote
“If they want to run open source right now, it's OSS 120B or Chinese models.”
— Andrew Feldman18:52
Key Quote
“So not our children nor anyone they know dies of cancer.”
— Andrew Feldman38:25