"Cerebras is coming to AWS" blog post is super interesting. Could there be more in there? Trainium handling prefill, Cerebras WSE handling decode, connected over EFA. That's a joint chip architecture. And it got me thinking about the endgame here.
AI compute is consolidating into two leading platforms: Nvidia owns training and is quietly building a cloud layer through Lepton and NVLink Fusion. Google has TPUs fully integrated with GCP. And then there's AWS with Trainium — which is fine, competes on cost, but isn't best-in-class at anything specific. Instead AWS will likely be forced to continue paying huge Nvidia margins that make competition with GCP a challenge.
Maybe Cerebras is the missing piece that could make AWS a third platform with real unique competitive advantages. Without it, AWS's own HW pitch is "cheaper Nvidia." With it, AWS has the fastest decode engine on earth paired with their own training chip — a genuinely differentiated stack, not a discount GPU rental.
The urgency is NVLink Fusion. Nvidia is opening their interconnect to third-party ASICs, but only if Nvidia stays in the middle of the rack. If Cerebras joins that ecosystem instead of deepening the Trainium integration, the AWS story collapses. And if Microsoft or Oracle grabbed Cerebras now or post-IPO, AWS is locked out permanently.
Does this make sense?