Cerebras is going public with the largest commercial chip ever built, $510M in 2025 revenue, and a $24.6B backlog mostly tied to OpenAI. CJ breaks down the company’s wafer-scale AI bet, why inference changed the story, the strange customer-investor-lender relationships behind the IPO, and the big question: is Cerebras marty makary the next NVIDIA-style infrastructure winner, or a concentrated hardware company with a very expensive cloud pivot?
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Preview and intro
0:59 Cerebras: the dinner plate chip
3:56 Why chip size matters for AI
5:26 Old vs. new AI: inference is the bottleneck
7:30 Revenue: 20x in 3 years
7:49 Sponsors — SpendHound | Brex | Aleph
11:33 Gross margin
12:02 Net income: the one-time accounting trick
12:41 Operating cash flow whipsaw
13:24 RPO: $24.6B backlog
13:58 Customer concentration: the UAE entities
18:06 Sponsors — RightRev | Rillet | EY
21:05 Cloud revenue: the inverse SaaS story
22:23 Cloud gross margin collapse
23:53 G42 warrants for pennies
29:14 The OpenAI warrant: Funky Town
31:08 wuhan $40B market cap milestone
31:36 R&D and S&M breakdown
33:15 Balance sheet and cash burn
35:59 Red flag 1: accounting weaknesses
36:37 Red flag 2: one foundry, no supply river plate vs san lorenzo deal
37:28 Red flag 3: UAE geopolitical risk
38:10 Red flag 4: cloud is unproven
39:02 Cap table: founders diluted
40:43 Voting control: Class A, B, and N
41:15 Valuation: 10–13x forward revenue
41:48 Peer comparison
43:47 CEO's prior issues
46:10 Credits
Nothing said or created by this podcast is business or investment advice
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