Cerebras Inference is the inference API from Cerebras Systems that runs open-weight LLMs on wafer-scale CS-3 chips instead of GPUs. The service exposes popular open models — including Llama 3.1 8B, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 4 Maverick, Qwen 3 32B, Qwen 3 235B, GPT-OSS 120B, and GLM-4 — through an OpenAI-compatible REST API. Because the CS-3 keeps an entire model on one wafer-scale die with 44 GB of on-chip SRAM, there is no weight streaming between HBM and compute, which is the part that caps GPU inference speed.
Developers point an OpenAI SDK at api.cerebras.ai and get output speeds that routinely benchmark between 1,800 and 2,600 tokens per second on Llama 3.1 8B and several hundred tokens per second on 70B-class models — roughly 10–20x faster than hyperscaler GPU endpoints for the same weights. The platform offers a free tier of up to one million tokens per day with no credit card, paid pay-per-token pricing that starts at $0.04–0.10 per million tokens for smaller Llama models, and enterprise tiers with dedicated capacity. Structured outputs, tool calling, streaming, and reasoning-mode endpoints for the Qwen thinking models are all supported.
Cerebras is most compelling for teams building real-time agents, voice applications, and interactive coding copilots where latency dominates cost, or for batch pipelines that need to burn through large token counts without multi-hour queue times. Compared to Groq, which runs similar models on LPUs, Cerebras generally posts higher raw tokens-per-second on larger models and offers a broader lineup of Qwen and reasoning models. The main trade-offs are a narrower catalog than Together AI or Fireworks, no proprietary frontier weights, and occasional capacity limits on the newest models during launch windows.
