UAE’s G42 and Cerebras Sytems Seal $100 Million Deal for AI Supercomputers

Silicon Valley-based company Cerebras Systems announced on Thursday that it has sealed a massive $100 million deal with Emirati tech group, G42, to bring some seriously powerful AI supercomputers to the market.

Talk about making the headlines.

What makes this deal quite significant is the time. It comes at a time when cloud computing providers from all over the globe are actively hunting for alternatives to chips from the semiconductor giant, Nvidia Corp, a leading player in AI computing power.

The shortage, mainly ignited by the excessive demand for AI services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, has skyrocketed in the past months, mushrooming a blistering shortage of Nvidia’s products. 

And that’s exactly where Cerebras comes in – as one of the biggest startups trying to challenge Nvidia’s chip market dominance.

“Celebras has what they call a ‘white glove’ service that made it easy for us to build AI systems in its machines,” Talal AlKaissi, G42 Cloud CEO, told Reuters. “There will be some excess capacity that we hope to wholesale with Cerebras to customers in the open-source AI community from any places around the world, especially in the US ecosystem.”

So, the plan is the following: Cerebras provides G42 with the needed Condor Galaxy systems, a 4ExaFLOP, 54 million core, 64 node supercomputer for generative AI. In parallel, G42 is set to purchase three of the AI company’s supercomputers, where Cerebras will be taking charge of the development and construction of the computers in the US to speed up to the process. 

According to the official announcement, the first supercomputer will be up and running sometime this year, and then the other two in early 2024.

Cerebras CEO, Andres Feldman told Reuters that the company plans to move this operation to the UAE for three months to work closely with G42 to ensure the highest level of quality when developing this sophisticated computing services. Feldman also highlighted the vitality of such an opportunity to shake up the market.

The Abu-Dhabi based company is already setting in motion big plans for Cerebras’ computing power with the intend of using them to provide powerful computing services to various key industries, with the most prominent ones being healthcare and energy.

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