Recent court documents reveal that OpenAI had contemplated purchasing Cerebras, an AI chip manufacturer preparing to go public.
According to new evidence in Elon Musk’s continuing case against OpenAI, OpenAI was considering acquiring Cerebras in or around 2017—a year after Cerebras was founded and only a few years after OpenAI started operations.
Ilya Sutskever, a former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, proposed purchasing Cerebras through Musk’s electric vehicle business, Tesla, in an email sent to Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Musk had some control over OpenAI’s course at the time and was financially invested in the company.
In September 2017, Sutskever wrote, “In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that it’ll be done through Tesla,” “But why do it this way if we could also do it from within OpenAI? Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI’s mission. So the overall result may not end up being optimal for OpenAI.”
Sutskever lists a number of Cerebras-related agenda items in a previous email sent in July 2017 to Musk and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who is currently the company’s president: “Negotiate merger terms with Cerebras” and “More due diligence with Cerebras.”
Although it’s unclear from the exhibits why, the merger deal would eventually fail. Additionally, OpenAI would put its chip goals on hold for years.
Based in Sunnyvale, California, Cerebras creates specialized hardware for AI model execution and training. The company asserts that its chips are quicker and more effective for AI workloads than Nvidia’s flagship products.
Cerebras has received $715 million in venture funding and is apparently looking to use the IPO to almost treble its $4 billion valuation. But it has a lot of obstacles to overcome. Eighty-seven percent of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024 came from a single Abu Dhabi company, G42, whose longstanding ties to China have alarmed U.S. politicians. Having pled guilty to evading financial controls while serving as a vice president at the publicly traded business Riverstone Networks, Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebras, likewise had a troubled past.
The transaction might have been advantageous to both businesses if it had taken place. OpenAI may have had an important advantage in its competition to develop in-house chips, while Cerebras would have avoided the road to a challenging IPO.
Since Nvidia holds a significant portion of the market for processors with AI optimization, OpenAI has long aimed to lessen its need on the company. OpenAI is under pressure to lower the cost of training, fine-tuning, and operating models, even though it is late to the in-house chip game—Google and Amazon Web Services, among others, have long provided chips made for AI workloads. It could be able to achieve the necessary savings by having its own chips.
At one point, OpenAI was thinking about being an acquisition target and intended to build a network of chip manufacturing factories. However, IBM has apparently shelved such plans in favor of rapidly expanding a team of engineers and chip designers and collaborating with semiconductor companies TSMC and Broadcom to develop an AI processor for running models. It might show up as early as 2026.