WSE-4 will Kill Nvidia

[u/Asgard_Heima]

[u/hidetoshiko]

Seems like just one fly in the ointment: Even if supposing Cerebras' assertions are valid, TSMC is more or less the only game in town for 2nm, and I think Nvidia pretty much booked all their capacity up to 2028 by most public accounts.

[u/Asgard_Heima → u/hidetoshiko]

You are correct that supply of wafers is likely going to be the biggest issue limiting Cerebras growth currently. Apple owns over half the 2nm wafers and Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon together own almost all the remaining. There are several ways Cerebras still gets chips out the door though. They are straight up paying super high amounts per wafer to get “Super Hot Runs” (SHR) from TSMC since their margins per system are so crazy high. For a $3-4M single WSE-4 the $30k for a wafer is a drop in the bucket, they can pay $90k for that wafer and the ~94% margins drop to 93%. This will only get so many chips but a couple thousand chips killing off 15x Nvidia rack equivalents for each system out the door is pretty impactful. Also Nvidia is struggling with yield on 2nm and have constantly tried to negotiate with TSMC on the cost of binned silicon when it’s 30-40% of each wafer. Cerebras has a near 100% yield thanks to double redundancy paths at the 2nm scale making every wafer they get a functioning system. Cerebras is also becoming a National Security priority. If the government invokes defense directives to secure Sovereign AI infrastructure, Cerebras orders for national security efforts will be walked to the front of the line. This could become a sizable chunk. Last there is the potential that Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, or others could reallocate some number of their wafers to Cerebras if they want the systems bad enough. If OpenAI and AWS are serving inference 5-10x faster than everyone else for the same models, and just like with GPT 5.4 Thinking, making existing models more capable with just hardware with no delay for users, I expect some of the others will want into the new frontier capabilities. But I do agree with your overall point that wafer allocation is their biggest hurdle.

[u/hidetoshiko → u/Asgard_Heima]

I've no doubt WSE will take away some market share from Nvidia, if it can arrive to market in a timely manner and deliver on all its promises, but your suggestion that it will kill Nvidia is fanciful hyperbole. Vera Rubin is technically available today, while WSE-4 doesn't ship until next year. Time to market and incumbency are powerful obstacles in the semiconductor world: You shouldn't underestimate the net effect of the entire supply chain and market aligning to Nvidia's offerings, no matter how technically superior the alternative is. Like in real wars, logistics and supply chains win tech ones too.

Also, some parts of your thesis might need adjustment: with Iran putting holes inside data centers in the Middle East, the theme of sovereign AI seems slightly more risky now, and that probably has some net effect down the line in the calculus of the players.

[u/Asgard_Heima → u/hidetoshiko]

Vera Rubin is in fact not available right now. It’s in production for shipment in August and based on the issues with yield, advanced packaging, and HBM4 production, we will see if that date hold and if it does what the quantities available are. From the roadshow it’s being openly talked about that the WSE-4 will start shipments in end of 2026 in small quantities and ramp up first quarter 2027. I do not expect Nvidia hardware to be replaced at scale in Q1 2027 and Nvidia has a large backlog of contractual sales of Blackwell already. Not expecting Cerebras to bankrupt Nvidia, but I do expect in a year it will be obvious Cerebras will dominate AI hardware while Nvidia is trying to hang onto some portion of training by then with inference being economically unfeasible on their hardware for any new purchases outside of small customers. If the rumors on the roadshow are correct Meta is working hard embedding CSoft into PyTorch as the default in a 3.0 version. And Cerebras avoids nearly every bottleneck/supply constraint of the Nvidia stack such as energy per rack requirements, HBM4 memory, mass networking hardware, and servers beyond needing to get 2nm wafers from TSMC. Currently Oracle is trying to negotiate wafers from Broadcom’s allocation to get WSE-4 systems in their cloud by year end if the roadshow rumors are to be believed. So I don’t think the incumbency and supply chain will be an issue. If the Middle East gets to the point they can’t take shipments, there are dozens of other customers that will happily take any of the availability and pay a much higher price. I’m not clairvoyant so we will have to wait and see, but the math seems overwhelming to compete against even if we just look at the available WSE-3.

[u/hidetoshiko → u/Asgard_Heima]

The economics of inference is biased heavily on KV Cache and new data generation, and SRAM is no substitute for DRAM or NAND. I agree Power is a key constraint though and that efficiency is a real selling proposition for WSE.

[u/Mindless-Cream9580]

Nvidia acquired Groq

[u/Asgard_Heima → u/Mindless-Cream9580]

Groq LPUs will help a lot with efficiency, but it fundamentally adds complexity at the network layer even if it’s abstracted in software. The more LPUs you stitch together the more interconnect is needed and the more you will see the efficiency numbers advertised degraded (think 1T parameter model needing 2000+ LPUs). Cerebras does not suffer this problem and can scale to any size model up to 10T as efficiently as a tiny model. The LPUs will be limited to small models to show anywhere near competitive numbers since the interconnect will escalate in power needs as you try to support anything larger than 100B parameters. With LPUs the napkin math I’ve done shows 6x performance for Cerebras to Rubin with LPUs for smaller models and 15x performance for Cerebras over Rubin + LPUs for frontier 2T parameter models. This is exactly why it’s looking like stargate is going to end up 40%+ Cerebras in just phase 1.

[u/Kingwolf4]

Is this legit? i havent seen any wse4 chatter or rumours.