Cerebras' Plum OpenAI Deal Is a Double-Edged Sword

When some journalist writes the book on the AI boom, one critical chapter will start on Christmas Eve 2025. That was the day that Nvidia and OpenAI’s complicated frenemy relationship became incredibly lucrative for chip startups that focus on AI inference.

We already know that Christmas Eve was the day the tech industry (and this newsroom) scrambled to make sense of the news that Nvidia would spend billions of dollars for chip startup Groq and its founder, an inventor of Google’s tensor processing units. Now, thanks to securities filings, we also know it was the date that OpenAI decided to commit billions of dollars to buy chips from Groq rival Cerebras, which makes dinner-plate–size chips that can run AI models rapidly.