Over the past three years, Nvidia (NVDA 0.86%) evolved from a niche semiconductor player into the most valuable company in the world. The catalyst behind its meteoric rise can be summed up in three letters: GPU.
Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the engine of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution -- fueling everything from large language models (LLMs) to autonomous vehicles, robotics, and high-end video rendering.
But while Nvidia's dominance appears unshakable, a challenger is emerging. The startup Cerebras is making bold claims that its chips can power AI models 20 times faster than Nvidia's hardware. It's an ambitious promise -- and one that has investors asking whether Nvidia's reign might finally face a serious contender.
Cerebras' wafer-scale chip explained: One giant engine for AI
To understand why Cerebras is generating so much buzz, investors need to look at how it's breaking the rules of traditional chip design.
Nvidia's GPUs are small but powerful processors that must be clustered -- sometimes in the tens of thousands -- to perform the enormous calculations required to train modern AI models. These clusters deliver incredible performance, but they also introduce inefficiencies. Each chip must constantly pass data to its neighbors through high-speed networking equipment, which creates communication delays, drives up energy costs, and adds technical complexity.
Cerebras turned this model upside down. Instead of linking thousands of smaller chips, it has a single, massive processor the size of an entire silicon wafer -- aptly named the Wafer Scale Engine. Within this one piece of silicon sit hundreds of thousands of cores that work together seamlessly. Because everything happens on a unified architecture, data no longer needs to bounce between chips -- dramatically boosting speed while cutting power consumption.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why Cerebras thinks it can outrun Nvidia
Cerebras' big idea is efficiency. By eliminating the need for inter-chip communication, its wafer-scale processor keeps an entire AI model housed within a single chip -- cutting out wasted time and power.
That's where Cerebras' claim of 20x faster performance originates. The breakthrough isn't about raw clock speed; rather, it's about streamlining how data moves and eliminating bottlenecks.
Data source: Cerebras.
The practical advantage to this architecture is simplicity. Instead of managing, cooling, and synchronizing tens of thousands of GPUs, a single Cerebras system can occupy just on one rack and be ready for deployment -- translating to dramatic savings on AI infrastructure costs.
Why Nvidia still reigns
Despite the hype, Cerebras still carries risk. Manufacturing a chip this large is an engineering puzzle. Yield rates can fluctuate, and even a minor defect anywhere on the wafer can compromise a significant portion of the processor. This makes scaling a wafer-heavy model both costly and uncertain.
Nvidia remains the undisputed leader in AI computing. Beyond its powerful hardware, Nvidia's CUDA software platform created a deeply entrenched ecosystem on which virtually every major hyperscaler builds its generative AI applications. Replacing this kind of competitive moat requires more than cutting-edge hardware -- it demands a complete shift in how businesses design and deploy AI, forcing them to consider the operational burden of switching costs.
That said, the total addressable market (TAM) for AI chips is expanding rapidly, leaving room for new architectures to coexist alongside incumbents like Nvidia. For instance, Alphabet's tensor processing units (TPUs) are tailored for deep learning tasks, whereas Nvidia's GPUs serve as versatile, general-purpose workhorses. This dynamic suggests that Cerebras could carve out its own niche within the AI chip realm without needing to dethrone Nvidia entirely.
How to invest in Cerebras stock
Cerebras previously explored an initial public offering (IPO) and even published a draft S-1 filing late last year. However, following a recent $1.1 billion funding round, the company appears to have put its IPO plans on hold. For now, investing in Cerebras is largely limited to accredited investors, venture capital (VC) firms, and private equity funds.
For everyday investors, the more practical approach is to stick with established chip leaders such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, or ancillary partners like Broadcom or Micron Technology -- all of which are poised to benefit from the explosive growth of AI infrastructure spending.
