Cerebras Systems, founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman and a team of former chip architects, builds the Wafer-Scale Engine, a single dinner-plate-sized chip built for AI workloads instead of the small GPUs data centers wire together in large numbers, and sells both the hardware and a cloud inference service built on it.
That architecture translates into inference speed: independent benchmarks have repeatedly clocked Cerebras Cloud running open models like Llama at token-generation rates well above GPU-based inference providers, which has made it a go-to option for latency-sensitive applications.
Cloud inference is priced per million tokens, varying by model, while the physical CS-3 systems sell in the multi-million-dollar range for organizations that want the hardware on-premises. For a team that needs the fastest available inference speed on open models without touching custom hardware, Cerebras Cloud addresses that directly.
