An AI supercomputer whirs to life, powered by giant computer chips

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

The supercomputer, which was unveiled Thursday by Cerebras, a Silicon Valley startup, was built with the company's specialized chips, which are designed to power artificial intelligence products. The chips stand out for their size — like that of a dinner plate, or 56 times as large as a chip commonly used for AI. Each Cerebras chip packs the computing power of hundreds of traditional chips.

Cerebras said it had built the supercomputer for G42, an AI company. G42 said it planned to use the supercomputer to create and power AI products for the Middle East. «What we're showing here is that there is an opportunity to build a very large, dedicated AI supercomputer,» said Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras.

He added that his startup wanted «to show the world that this work can be done faster, it can be done with less energy, it can be done for lower cost.» Demand for computing power and AI chips has skyrocketed this year, fueled by a worldwide AI boom. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta and Google, as well as myriad startups, have rushed to roll out AI products in recent months after the AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot went viral for the eerily humanlike prose it could generate. But making AI products typically requires significant amounts of computing power and specialized chips, leading to a ferocious hunt for more of those technologies.

In May, Nvidia, the leading maker of chips used to power AI systems, said appetite for its products — known as graphics processing units, or GPUs — was so strong that its quarterly sales would be more than 50% above Wall Street estimates. The forecast sent Nvidia's market value soaring above $1 trillion. «For the first time, we're seeing a huge jump in the computer requirements» because of AI