Cerebras got lucky with the ban on NVIDIA chips due to "security reasons" in the middle east, securing a massive deal with the UAE's sovereign fund. Of course, the leaders made a nice donation to the Trump crypto fund and coincidentally the ban on NVIDIA was lifted. That presented a danger for Cerebras, but they also pivoted almost entirely to an inference as a service company, maximizing tokens/sec metrics on a variety of open weight models. Then they landed the contract with OpenAI which has bought them another lifeline, and helped paper over the trail of fraud that delayed the S1 and IPO for a few years. Fascinating story indeed!