Why OpenAI’s Cerebras Chip Deal Matters; What Anthropic Wants to Know About Chinese Rivals

OpenAI executives have repeatedly signaled, both publicly and privately, that the only factor limiting the company’s revenue growth is access to computational resources. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar wrote an entire blog post on this topic earlier this year, and OpenAI executives highlighted the message again in a presentation to investors last week.

In the meeting, execs emphasized how the company has struck a variety of deals in recent months with cloud and chip providers including Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom to ensure it’ll have access to enough powerful servers to continue growing, according to a person with knowledge of the presentation. But in one way the most important deal may be OpenAI’s agreement to buy $10 billion worth of chips from a lesser known chip firm—Cerebras Systems—which OpenAI executives spent extra time highlighting last week, the person said.

It turns out the reason OpenAI struck the deal is highly technical but symbolizes OpenAI’s strategy for turning profitable: using different kinds of hardware in a way that reduces its costs.