Connect with us

Published

on

Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, speaks at the Collision conference in Toronto on June 20, 2024.

Ramsey Cardy | Sportsfile | Collision | Getty Images

AI chipmaker Cerebras is trying to be the first major venture-backed tech company to go public in the U.S. since April and to capitalize on investors’ insatiable demand for Nvidia, now valued at $3.3 trillion.

While its position in artificial intelligence infrastructure represents a major tail wind, Cerebras has challenges — most notably a hefty reliance on a single Middle Eastern customer — that may prove too weighty to overcome in the company’s attempt to ride the Nvidia wave. Valued at $4 billion in 2021, Cerebras is reportedly seeking to roughly double that in its IPO.

“There’s too much hair on this deal,” David Golden, a startup investor at Revolution Ventures who led tech investment banking at JPMorgan Chase from 2000 to 2006, said in an interview this week. “This would never have gotten through our underwriting committee.”

Cerebras launched in 2016 and three years later unveiled its first processor. The company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, claims its current chip is faster and more efficient than Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, or GPU, for training large language models.

In 2023, Cerebras’ sales more than tripled to $78.7 million. In the first half of 2024, revenue climbed to $136.4 million, and growth appears poised to ramp up significantly, as Cerebras says in its prospectus that it’s signed agreements to sell $1.43 billion worth of systems and services, with prepayment expected before March 2025.

But the most glaring red flag in Cerebras’ filing relates to customer concentration. One company based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, accounted for 87% of revenue in the first half of the year. The customer, G42, is backed by Microsoft, and it’s entirely responsible for the $1.43 billion purchase commitment.

Cerebras doesn’t list any other clients in its prospectus, but it does name a few on its website, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and the Mayo Clinic. Cerebras says in the filing that, in expanding its customer base, the company plans to “aggressively pursue opportunities in relevant sectors such as healthcare, pharmaceutical, biotechnology” and other areas “where our AI acceleration capabilities can address critical computational bottlenecks.”

Cerebras Systems likely to postpone IPO after facing delays with CFIUS Review, reports say

In addition to its reliance on G42 for business, Cerebras counts the company as an investor, and it’s seeking clearance from the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, to give the Middle Eastern firm a bigger position. G42 has agreed to purchase a $335 million stake by April that, at current levels, would make it the largest owner. G42 can pick up $500 million more in Cerebras shares if it commits to spend $5 billion on the company’s computing clusters.

CFIUS has the authority to review foreign investments in U.S. companies for potential national security concerns. Cerebras said in its filing that it doesn’t believe CFIUS has “jurisdiction over G42’s purchase of our non-voting securities” but added that “there is no guarantee that CFIUS will approve” it. Reuters on Tuesday reported that Cerebras was likely to delay its initial public offering and call off its roadshow, scheduled to start next week, due to a national security review. Reuters cited people familiar with the matter.

U.S. lawmakers have expressed unease about G42’s historic ties to China, through both past investments and customer relationships. G42 said in February that it had sold its stakes in Chinese companies after Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, wrote a letter of concern to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo about what he called G42’s “extensive business relationships with Chinese military companies, state-owned entities and the PRC intelligence services.”

G42 didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Shunned by top banks

Even if it achieves CFIUS approval, Cerebras has a lot to overcome in trying to sell this deal to investors following a long stretch of suppressed valuations for smaller tech companies and a shortage of IPOs since the end of 2021.

Adding to Cerebras’ list of potential roadblocks is the fact that none of the primary tech investment banks are involved.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have long dominated IPO underwriting in tech, with JPMorgan Chase also battling to get in the mix. They’re all absent from the Cerebras deal, and sources with knowledge of the process, who asked not to be named because the talks are private, said they stayed away in part due to the risks associated with customer concentration and foreign investment.

The deal is being led by Citigroup and Barclays, which are both large global banks but not the ones that get leadership positions on top tech IPOs.

Representatives from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Barclays didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Cerebras’ auditor is BDO, which isn’t one of the so-called Big Four accounting firms. For the other three venture-backed IPOs this year, the accountants were KPMG (Reddit and Rubrik) and PwC (Astera Labs), which are two of the Big Four, along with Deloitte and Ernst & Young.

BDO declined to comment.

There’s also Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman, who pleaded guilty in 2007 to one count of circumventing accounting controls when he was vice president of marketing at a public company called Riverstone Networks a few years earlier.

“What else could you have added to this to make it really difficult?” Revolution’s Golden said.

A Cerebras spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

The major Wall Street banks, for their part, are finding other ways to play in the burgeoning AI infrastructure market. Last week, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley were among a roster of banks that participated in issuing a $4 billion revolving line of credit to OpenAI. And on Friday, Nvidia GPU provider CoreWeave announced the close of a $650 million credit facility that was led by the top three tech banks.

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, on Thursday, April 7, 2022.

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

For Cerebras, there’s still a path to an IPO, given the sheer excitement around AI chips and the dearth of investable opportunities in the market.

Also, Nvidia is trading near a record. Mizuho Securities estimates that Nvidia controls 95% of the market for AI training and inference chips used for models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel said at the All-In Summit last month that Nvidia is the only company in the space that’s making money.

“Nvidia is making over 100% of the profits,” Thiel said in an on-stage interview at the event in Los Angeles. “Everybody else is collectively losing money.”

Cerebras is still in the money-losing column, reporting a second-quarter net loss of almost $51 million. However, excluding stock-based compensation, the company is close to breakeven on an operating basis.

Retail investor Jim Fitch, a retired homebuilder in Florida, is among those excited about the opportunity to get in early. Fitch, who said he sold out of his Nvidia stock years ago, told CNBC that the benefits outweigh the risks. He noted that Feldman, Cerebras’ co-founder and CEO, sold his prior company, SeaMicro, to Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices for more than $300 million over a decade ago.

Fitch is drawn to the promise of Cerebras’ technology, particularly its WSE-3 chip, which the company calls “the fastest AI processor on Earth,” packed with 4 trillion transistors.

“It’ll do the work of 100 Nvidias,” Fitch said.

WATCH: Cerebras CEO on competition with Nvidia

Cerebras CEO: Our inference offering is 20x faster than Nvidia's and a fraction of the price

Continue Reading

Technology

Amazon announces first Kindle ever with color screen, retailing for $279

Published

on

By

Amazon announces first Kindle ever with color screen, retailing for 9

Kindle Colorsoft 2024

Amazon

Amazon on Wednesday announced a new Kindle e-reader, and for the first time ever it has a color display.

The retailing giant introduced the Kindle in 2007, and every device since then has had a black-and-white screen. The new Kindle has a display that’s designed to ensure colors don’t appear washed out or pixelated, even when users zoom in on images.

The $279 device, which Amazon is calling the Kindle Colorsoft, has “weeks of battery life,” the company said. It can be preordered now and ships on Oct. 30.

Amazon also unveiled a refreshed $399 Kindle Scribe with new note-taking features, an updated $159 Kindle Paperwhite and a 12th generation Kindle, which costs $109. At a press event in New York on Tuesday, Amazon’s devices chief, Panos Panay, called the updates the “largest single refresh that the Kindle lineup has ever had.”

Kindle Lineup 2024

Amazon

The Kindle Scribe, which Amazon introduced in 2022, comes with a pen that allows users to take notes, make to-do lists and write directly on the pages of the book they’re reading. With the new note-taking feature, called Active Canvas, users can take notes directly on an e-book’s pages and the text will automatically shift to flow around it. They’ll also be able to take notes in the margins of the book and hide them for later.

The Kindle Scribe includes another new feature that uses generative artificial intelligence to summarize pages of notes into a concise list. Amazon said the feature uses Bedrock, a software tool that lets users access large language models from Amazon and other companies like Anthropic and Stability AI. The device is available for preorder now and ships Dec. 4.

The new Kindle Paperwhite is faster than previous models, and also features a larger, 7-inch display, up from 6.8 inches on the prior version. Amazon says the 12th generation Kindle is its most “compact” e-reader ever, with a brighter display. Both devices are available starting Wednesday.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

Amazon ramps up AI chip race

Continue Reading

Technology

ASML just gave us a first glimpse into how U.S. chip export curbs will dent its China sales

Published

on

By

ASML just gave us a first glimpse into how U.S. chip export curbs will dent its China sales

An ASML icon is being displayed on a circuit board, alongside the flags of the USA and China, in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, on January 4, 2024.

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

ASML on Tuesday offered the first glimpse into how U.S. restrictions on exports of its advanced chip manufacturing tools to China will impact its sales in the Asian country.

The Netherlands-based chip equipment maker said in its earnings report Tuesday, which was released a day early due to a “technical error,” that it expects net sales for 2025 to come in between 30 billion euros and 35 billion euros ($32.7 billion and $38.1 billion). This is at the lower half of the range ASML had guided previously.

ASML is a critical part of the global chip supply chain. The firm’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines are used by many of the world’s largest chipmakers — from Nvidia to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing — to produce advanced chips.

While third-quarter net sales at the firm reached 7.5 billion euros — beating expectations — net bookings came in at 2.6 billion euros ($2.83 billion), the company said. That was well below a 5.6 billion euro consensus estimate from LSEG.

ASML shares plunged as much as 16% on Tuesday in response, causing the firm to shed over $50 billion in market capitalization in a single day, according to CNBC calculations using LSEG data.

Beyond the disappointment on bookings — which analysts said was due to weakness in a select number of customers, including Intel and Samsung — AMSL also gave an indication of how geopolitical tensions are putting pressure on its 2025 outlook.

Roger Dassen, ASML’s chief financial officer, said Tuesday that he expects the company’s China business to show a “more normalized percentage in our order book and also in our business.”

UBS analysts said the change in ASML’s 2025 guidance was mainly related to delays with the development of new logic fabrication facilities from Intel and Samsung, adding that the new guidance implies sales to China would fall 25% to 30% in 2025.

How important is China to ASML?

ASML’s China-based customers have been stockpiling the firm’s less advanced machines to get ahead of U.S. export restrictions on the Dutch firm and to continue being able to access its critical technology, which enables them to manufacturer chips for the electronics industry.

ASML has never sold its most advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV machines to Chinese customers due to previous restrictions.

Instead, chip firms in the country have opted to order ASML’s deep ultra violet lithography, or DUV machines. DUV machines are ASML’s second-tier lithography systems that are critical to make the circuitry of chips.

Last year ASML sourced 29% of its sales from China. It now expects that contribution from China to drop to around 20% of its total revenue in 2025.

Sales to China grew dramatically in the first three quarters of 2024 as customers scrambled to buy ASML’s DUV machines in bulk head of U.S. and Dutch export restrictions.

In the company’s second-quarter 2024 earnings presentation, ASML said that it sourced as much as 49% of its sales from China.

In September, the Netherlands expanded export restrictions on advanced chip manufacturing equipment by bringing licensing requirements of ASML’s machines under its purview and thereby taking over from the U.S. on controlling what machines ASML is able to export to other countries.

The move meant that the Dutch government would be able to effectively block ASML from maintaining the DUV machines it has sold to China so far.

“China is a very important market for China,” Chris Miller, assistant professor of international history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and author of the book “Chip War,” told CNBC in emailed comments. “Most of this revenue is from older-generation chipmaking tools.”

Ironically, restrictions on exports of DUV machines to China “have probably helped ASML on net, because China has accelerated purchases of older generation DUV tools as a result,” Miller added.

Now, ASML is expecting a drop-off in sales to China as a result of U.S. trade restrictions. The firm expects China to return to taking up a smaller share of its overall global sales in 2025, CFO Dassen said in a transcript of a video interview Tuesday.

“We do see China trending towards more historically normal percentages in our business,” Dassen said. “So we expect China to come in at around 20% of our total revenue for next year. Which would also be in line with its representation in our backlog.” 

Analysts at Bank of America said the firm faces a “sharp decline in China revenues.” They added that ASML’s forecast of China accounting for around 20% of its revenue in 2025, implies a 48% revenue decline year-over-year — more severe than the 3% they had anticipated.

Abishur Prakash, founder of Toronto-based advisory firm The Geopolitical Business, said that demand from China for ASML’s machines is likely to drop significantly as the firm is “severely restricted by export controls.”

“Like Intel, for whom China is the largest market, ASML is deeply reliant on China,” Prakash told CNBC via email. “For ASML, it is watching what is taking place with China as a potential restriction on business.”

“As the chip world is cut from China, ASML could see demand for its equipment drop — from China and elsewhere,” Prakash added.

Continue Reading

Technology

Generative AI startups get 40% of all VC investment in cloud amid ChatGPT buzz

Published

on

By

Generative AI startups get 40% of all VC investment in cloud amid ChatGPT buzz

Style-photography | Istock | Getty Images

Generative artificial intelligence startups are getting 40% of all the venture capital funding that flows into cloud companies, according to venture investors Accel.

In its latest annual Euroscape report, which looks at key cloud and AI trends, Accel said that venture funding for cloud startups based in the U.S., Europe and Israel is projected to rise to $79.2 billion this year, with artificial intelligence fueling much of the recovery.

Venture funding into the cloud industry climbed 27% annually — marking the first year of growth in three years. Cloud startups raised $62.5 billion in Europe, Israel and the U.S. in 2023, the report found.

Funding is up 65% from the $47.9 billion cloud firms raised four years ago, according to Accel.

It comes after OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind the buzzy generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, earlier this month raised $6.6 billion in a mammoth funding round that valued the startup at $157 billion.

AI is eating software

Much of the growth of funding in cloud is being driven by excitement around AI.

“AI is sucking the air out of the room” when it comes to cloud, Philippe Botteri, partner at Accel, told CNBC in an interview this week. “This is both visible on the public market and and the private market.”

As of Sep. 30, the Euroscape index — a selection of publicly-listed U.S., European and Israeli cloud firms curated by Accel — is up 19% year-over-year.

People overestimate technological change in the short term, says VC

This pales in comparison with the 38% increase the Nasdaq saw this year and is also down 39% from the Euroscape index’s peak hit back in 2021.

The cloud industry has been having a tough time beyond AI, with enterprise software budgets squeezed by macroeconomic and geopolitical risks.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty out there,” Botteri said, adding that businesses are increasingly asking questions around geopolitical tensions and macroeconomic factors, which have affected software spending priorities.

Not a single company in Accel’s Euroscape index has seen revenue growth of more than 40% per year this year, compared with 23 businesses achieving the feat in 2021.

“IT budgets are shifting towards AI,” Botteri noted. “They are still growing slightly, but they are growing a few percent year-over-year.”

“Part of it is budgets going toward genAI, building new applications, testing these new technologies, so there is less for the rest,” the VC investor added.

Foundational models in focus

The top six generative AI companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel, respectively, accounted for roughly two thirds of the funding raised by all genAI startups, according to Accel’s Euroscape report.

A giant reborn: Satya Nadella's decade as Microsoft CEO

OpenAI raised a dominant $18.9 billion in 2023-24, taking the lion’s share of VC funding that went to U.S. genAI companies.

“When you look OpenAI and the speed at which the road to over $3 billion in revenues, this has been one of the fastest companies in software of all time,” said Botteri.

Anthropic raised the second-largest sum among U.S. genAI startups, with $7.8 billion, while Elon Musk’s xAI came in third.

In Europe, the biggest funding amounts went to Britain’s Wayve, France’s Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha.

Globally, companies building so-called foundational models, which power much of today’s generative AI tools, account for two thirds of overall funding for generative AI firms, Accel said.

Big Tech’s AI splurge

The U.S. took the lead globally in terms of overall regional generative AI investment raised.

Out of the $56 billion total siphoned into genAI firms globally over 2023-24, roughly 80% of the cash went to U.S.-based firms, Accel said, also noting that Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta are each investing an eye-watering average $30 billion to $60 billion in AI per year.

AI “majors” like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI are spending billions on the technology, Accel said, while smaller challengers including Cohere, H and Mistral are investing tens to hundreds of millions per year. 

Dev Ittycheria, CEO of database firm MongoDB, noted that it’s likely concentration of the most powerful AI models will consolidate to only a select few players that are able to attract the necessary capital to make investments in data centers and chips to train and run their systems.

“Access to capital will profoundly impact the performance of these models,” Ittycheria said in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” He added: “My bet is that over time, you won’t have this many model providers, you may come down to one or two.”

Continue Reading

Trending