Cerebras is an AI hardware and inference company that builds the Wafer-Scale Engine, purpose-built silicon designed to deliver the fastest AI inference speeds available. Unlike GPU-based systems that face memory bandwidth bottlenecks, the Cerebras architecture eliminates these constraints at the hardware level to achieve token generation speeds that no number of GPUs can match. Cerebras Inference provides developers with API access to popular open-source models running on Wafer-Scale Engine hardware, with processing speeds exceeding 3,000 tokens per second.
The Wafer-Scale Engine integrates hundreds of megabytes of on-chip SRAM as primary weight storage rather than cache, feeding compute units at full speed with sub-millisecond latency. Static scheduling and deterministic execution guarantee consistent performance at every scale, while advanced quantization techniques maintain output quality at high speeds. Cerebras demonstrated DeepSeek R1 Llama 70B running at over 1,500 tokens per second, roughly 57 times faster than GPU-based solutions. The second-generation LPU on Samsung 4nm process technology further improves performance and energy efficiency, with the inference cloud network capable of serving over 40 million Llama 70B tokens per second across six data centers.
Cerebras serves AI companies and developers building latency-sensitive applications where inference speed directly impacts user experience and product quality. Notable production users include Perplexity for real-time AI search and Mistral for Le Chat's Flash Answers feature. Meta has partnered with Cerebras to offer ultra-fast inference in its Llama API, with generation speeds up to 18x faster than traditional GPU solutions. The Cerebras Inference API is fully compatible with the OpenAI Chat Completions API for seamless migration. Cerebras competes with Groq, NVIDIA GPU clusters, and cloud inference providers, positioning itself as the hardware and infrastructure layer for next-generation AI applications that demand instant responses.
