AMD inks deal with AI chip startup Cerebras

Ina Fried

Woman on stage — Lisa Su, CEO of AMD. Photo: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

AMD on Thursday announced a partnership with Cerebras that will let customers split AI inference workloads across the companies' systems.

Why it matters: Inference is the part of AI computing that turns a trained model into a response, making it central to the speed and cost of everyday AI services.

The big picture: The deal comes shortly after AMD announced Anthropic as a major customer, as demand for AI compute continues to grow.

Driving the news: Cerebras plans to deploy AMD Helios systems in its data centers, with the joint offering available through Cerebras Cloud later this year.

AMD chips will handle prompt processing and large context windows, while Cerebras systems will accelerate token generation, which requires substantial memory bandwidth.
Earlier this week, AMD confirmed a deal to supply up to 2 gigawatts of computing power to Anthropic, with the first gigawatt expected to come online in 2027. AMD also agreed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.

What they're saying: AMD CEO Lisa Su said the partnership reflects a broader shift toward using different chips for different stages of an AI workload.

"I think we're going to see more workload disaggregation," Su said during a briefing with reporters.

By the numbers: Su said AI could help expand the global computing market to $2 trillion by 2030.

AMD says that includes data center servers, PCs and other embedded and edge devices.

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AMD inks deal with AI chip startup Cerebras

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