Andrew Feldman (Cerebras): 10 Key Things You Must Know

Overview

Andrew Feldman is an influential American entrepreneur and technology executive, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, a pioneering company in the artificial intelligence (AI) hardware industry. Feldman has made significant contributions to computer hardware designed specifically for AI workloads, spearheading innovations such as the world's largest computer chip optimized for AI — the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine. Over his career, Feldman has founded several successful technology startups and has become a prominent figure in semiconductor development, AI infrastructure, and deep learning technology. This article explores ten important facets of Andrew Feldman’s career, his leadership at Cerebras, technological breakthroughs stemming from his work, challenges faced including his past legal issues, and his vision for the future of AI hardware.

1. Early Career and Background

Andrew Feldman has an academic background rooted at Stanford University, where he completed both his undergraduate degree and MBA. He began his career in the networking and technology sectors, holding senior marketing and product management roles at companies like Riverstone Networks and Force10 Networks. Feldman co-founded SeaMicro, which specialized in energy-efficient microservers and was later sold to AMD for $357 million in 2012. His early entrepreneurial successes provided a foundation for his later ventures. Feldman’s experience combines deep technical understanding with strong business leadership, positioning him to innovate in emerging technology fields.

2. Founding and Leadership of Cerebras Systems

In 2015, Feldman co-founded Cerebras Systems alongside Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie, and Jean-Philippe Fricker with the mission to revolutionize AI computing. Conceiving a chip architecture optimized exclusively for AI workloads, Cerebras developed the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s largest processor chip. Feldman’s leadership emphasizes systems-level innovation, focusing not only on chip design but building complete AI computing platforms. Under his guidance, Cerebras has grown rapidly, expanding its headcount; as of 2025, the company employs over 650 employees worldwide and has offices in the U.S., Canada, India, and more.

3. The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine Innovation

A hallmark of Feldman’s work is the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine, a singular silicon wafer-sized chip housing hundreds of thousands of AI-optimized cores—over 900,000 cores in its latest generation with 4 trillion transistors. Unlike traditional approaches that fragment wafers into smaller chips, Cerebras maintains wafer-scale integration, enabling significant improvements in memory bandwidth, data movement, and power efficiency. This innovation addresses AI’s voracious need for data transfer speed and capacity, accelerating both AI training and inference, while reducing power consumption compared to GPUs from dominant incumbents like Nvidia.

4. Cerebras’ Impact on AI Hardware Market and Competition

Feldman’s Cerebras challenges the market dominance of Nvidia, which commands a 90%+ share of the AI chip market with its GPUs. Cerebras technologies have demonstrated significant performance advantages in inference and training workloads, boasting speed improvements over Nvidia’s top GPUs with better power efficiency. Feldman has been outspoken in industry discussions, critiquing Nvidia’s dominance and promoting Cerebras’ wafer-scale architecture as transformative. While Nvidia remains a formidable rival, Cerebras under Feldman’s leadership is carving a niche in ultra-high-performance AI computing, including large collaborations and strategic deployments.

5. Significant Partnerships and Customer Base

Cerebras has secured landmark partnerships and commercial deals, most notably with G42, a large AI technology group based in the United Arab Emirates. G42’s collaboration with Cerebras has involved building some of the world's fastest AI supercomputers, including networks of high-performance AI clusters deployed across multiple data centers in the U.S. and internationally. These partnerships have propelled Cerebras’ growth but have also introduced geopolitical sensitivities due to foreign investment scrutiny. Apart from G42, Cerebras counts major pharmaceutical, healthcare, and energy companies such as Mayo Clinic, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and TotalEnergies as customers, using Cerebras hardware for complex AI model training and inference.

6. Technical Vision and AI Computing Philosophy

Feldman’s approach to AI hardware centers on developing systems from the ground up to match AI’s unique demands—addressing computation, memory, and data movement simultaneously. His vision acknowledges the rapid evolution of AI workloads, including generative AI, agentic models, and reasoning-intensive tasks requiring unprecedented inference speed. Feldman stresses the importance of hardware/software co-design, scalability via wafer-scale integration, and enabling new applications that could emerge as AI gets faster and more efficient. He also emphasizes balancing proprietary technical excellence with openness and interoperability within the AI ecosystem.

7. Growth, Recent Developments, and IPO Journey

Cerebras Systems has experienced strong revenue growth; reporting $78.7 million in 2023, more than tripling from the previous year, and marking further expansion in 2024 with revenues surpassing $136 million in the first half. The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq under the ticker “CBRS” aiming for a valuation between $7 and $8 billion. However, the IPO faced delays and regulatory reviews primarily due to significant investment and revenue concentration around G42 and national security considerations. Feldman remains optimistic about going public, navigating these challenges while scaling the business globally and enhancing AI infrastructure capabilities.

8. Past Legal Issues and Their Impact

In 2007, Andrew Feldman pleaded guilty to one count of circumventing accounting controls when he was Vice President of Marketing at Riverstone Networks, a previous company he was involved with. This conviction, stemming from improper revenue recognition practices, has been widely cited in the context of Cerebras’s IPO filing, causing some controversy and investor concern. Feldman and Cerebras have addressed this past openly, emphasizing his leadership integrity and the company’s focus on compliance and transparency. Despite these issues, Feldman’s entrepreneurial track record and the company’s advancements have maintained investor interest.

9. Public Profile and Industry Influence

Feldman is recognized as one of the leading figures in AI chip development and has been featured on prestigious listings such as the 2024 TIME100 Most Influential People in AI. He frequently participates in industry conferences, podcast interviews, and panel discussions, sharing insights on AI infrastructure, chip innovation, and market dynamics. His leadership style is noted for blending technical depth, business acumen, and rigorous decision-making. Feldman actively advocates for efficient AI hardware systems and highlights the societal implications and future trajectories of artificial intelligence.

10. Future Outlook and Industry Challenges

Looking ahead, Feldman anticipates continued growth for Cerebras and broader adoption of wafer-scale AI processors in diverse sectors. He highlights challenges such as the rising energy demand of AI data centers, the need for sovereign and domain-specific AI models, and the geopolitical complexity in AI infrastructure investments. Cerebras is also expanding its manufacturing and R&D capacity, including plans to build sizable AI supercomputing sites in India and across the U.S. Feldman envisions AI chips as foundational to transformational applications, asserting that hardware innovation will remain a key driver of advances in artificial intelligence capabilities.

Conclusion

Andrew Feldman stands as a pioneering figure in the AI computing landscape, whose visionary leadership at Cerebras Systems has challenged traditional computing paradigms with wafer-scale chip technology. His career is marked by notable entrepreneurial successes, technical breakthroughs in AI hardware, and a commitment to pushing the frontiers of machine learning infrastructure. Although his journey includes controversies from past legal issues, Feldman has maintained a strong influence on the direction of the AI chip industry. As AI’s role expands globally, Feldman’s work shapes the future of ultra-high-performance computation, promising substantial impact across multiple industries. Will Cerebras under Feldman’s helm ultimately reshape AI hardware dominance and accelerate the age of artificial intelligence?