US AI chipmaker Cerebras partners with South Korea's Upstage for commercial inference

US AI chip maker Cerebras has chosen South Korean AI firm Upstage as its first commercial partner, signaling a significant move into the Korean market. The collaboration, announced July 11, will see Upstage's Solar 31B large language model run on Cerebras's WSE hardware.

Cerebras, known for its Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chips, boasts impressive capabilities with its latest WSE-3, featuring 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI cores. This partnership will enable Upstage's AI summarization feature on the popular Daum portal to process up to 2,000 tokens per second. This marks the first time Cerebras's AI accelerators will be used in a commercial service accessible to the general public in South Korea.

The integration is facilitated by Cerebras's "Cerebras Inference Cloud," a dedicated service designed to overcome the limitations of GPU-based infrastructure. The company claims its WSE-based CS-3 system offers up to 15 times the inference speed of typical GPU clouds. Cerebras also recently partnered with AWS to offer integrated solutions for generative AI and LLM tasks.

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We are able to provide developers with the Solar large language model, which boasts the industry's highest inference speed, in collaboration with Cerebras. Upstage and Cerebras will continue to work together on the large-scale deployment of immediately usable AI applications.

Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon expressed enthusiasm, stating, "We are able to provide developers with the Solar large language model, which boasts the industry's highest inference speed, in collaboration with Cerebras." Cerebras's Chief Marketing Officer, Julia Cho, added, "Korea is at the forefront of AI innovation, and we are delighted to partner with Upstage to offer a new level of inference performance to developers and businesses in Korea and around the world."

The move could pose a challenge to domestic AI chip startups like FuriosaAI and Rebellions, as Upstage's choice of Cerebras over local alternatives highlights the latter's advantages in large-scale serving capabilities and its existing relationship with OpenAI. Cerebras's smaller system footprint also makes it easier for South Korean cloud providers like Naver, SK Telecom, and KT to adopt.

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Korea is at the forefront of AI innovation, and we are delighted to partner with Upstage to offer a new level of inference performance to developers and businesses in Korea and around the world.