By Stephen Nellis and Krystal Hu
(Reuters) – Cerebras Systems on Thursday said that it has signed an approximately $100 million deal to supply the first of three artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers to the United Arab Emirates-based technology group G42.
The deal comes as cloud computing providers around the world are searching for alternatives to chips from Nvidia Corp, the market leader in AI computing whose products are in short supply, thanks to the surging popularity of ChatGPT and other services. Cerebras is one of several startups looking to challenge Nvidia.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras said that G42 has agreed to purchase three of what it calls its Condor Galaxy systems, all of which it will build in the U.S. to speed up the roll out. The first one will come online this year, with two more coming in early 2024.
Abu Dhabi-based G42, a tech conglomerate with nine operating companies that include datacenter and cloud service businesses, says it plans to use the Cerebras systems to sell AI computing services to health care and energy companies. G42 has raised $800 million from U.S. tech investment firm Silver Lake, which has backing from Mudabala, the UAE’s soverign wealth fund.
“Cerebras has what they call a ‘white glove’ service that made it easy for us” to build AI systems on its machines, G42 Cloud CEO Talal AlKaissi told Reuters.
“There will be some excess capacity that we hope to wholesale with Cerebras to customers in the open-source AI community from many places around the world, especially in the U.S. ecosystem.”
The contract to complete the first of the three systems announced on Thursday is worth about $100 million, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said.
“What we’re saying is that the $100 million contract takes us through Condor Galaxy 1… That’s the unit, the building block.”
G42 Cloud’s AlKaissi declined to comment on the terms of the deal.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Rashmi Aich)
