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Uncapped · 3 min · Sep 15, 2026

Failure analysis kept Cerebras going through 18 months of setbacks

Andrew Feldman describes spending $8 million a month while the team repeatedly failed to make wafer scale work. They kept going because each failure taught them something and they still had ideas.

Andrew Feldman

Andrew Feldman is cofounder and CEO of Cerebras Systems.

Co-founded and leads Cerebras Systems, whose wafer-scale engine is the largest processor in computing history.

  • Jack Altman, Host · General partner, Benchmark

    Co-founded Lattice and ran it until 2023, then started his fund, Alt Capital.

About this segment

Andrew Feldman describes spending $8 million a month while the team repeatedly failed to make wafer scale work. They kept going because each failure taught them something and they still had ideas.

From “Andrew Feldman on Building Cerebras and the Future of Chips | Ep. 57”, Sep 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“We hadn't run out of ideas. And each time we built it and it failed, we'd go through sort of good engineering practice.”
Andrew Feldmanat 11:30 · Uncapped11:30

Takeaways

  1. The team spent about $8 million a month during the impasse.
  2. Failure analysis helped them avoid repeating the same mistakes.
  3. Progress came in small steps before the breakthrough.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 4:09Attacking Goliath requires a radically better productPro pick 5:39

  2. 9:37Failure analysis kept Cerebras going through 18 months of setbacks3:29

  3. 16:13Chip fabs are a rare, tightly coupled supply chain6:53Up next
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 9:44

    What were the, like, along the way after some of these, like, early moments? I know that the company had, like, you know, some near-death experiences or whatever. like what were the what were sort of the hard hurdles I had some near-death experience when you can't build the thing you're supposed to build yeah like what are those like how would you frame what those periods are where you're like we just need I don't know was it a certain amount of time and a certain amount of capital and it's just going to be a valley of death is it that you just don't know whether you're going to make a technical breakthrough like what are the things that lead to those? I think in our space, we were always confident if we could make it, we'd sell it. Right? There are sort of two axes in our life. There's can you make it? And

  2. 10:31

    the other axis, can you sell it? Right? And we always believed that if we could make it, there would be huge demand for it. I think nobody had ever done wafer scale. There was a whole sort of collection of people who were saying it could never work. And we were unsure too. I mean, we believed we could do it, but there was no evidence. And there was a period of time, about 18 months, and we couldn't make it.

  3. 11:03

    and we're spending about eight million a month you have board meetings every six weeks all you've got to say is still can't make it right that's the board meeting i mean what else are we going to talk about i mean still can't make it again and again and again and i i give a huge right right they're like should i get in can i do anything to help that's right they're like can we help like no you can't oh there's nothing nothing that can be done nothing to be done But we believed because we had ideas still.

  4. 11:36

    We hadn't run out of ideas. And each time we built it and it failed, we'd go through sort of good engineering practice. We'd do a full failure analysis. We'd understand it. We would, and we wouldn't fail that way again. All new mistakes. All new mistakes. So we sort of had a, that was sort of our mantra, only new mistakes. Right? Only new failures. And over time, we could see progress. I mean, in the beginning, we were shattering wafers, right, in seconds. And then it took minutes. And then we had one run for an hour. And then we shattered some in minutes again.

  5. 12:17

    And then we built back up to the point we had a day in sort of July of 2019 where we were running and temperature was flat and we just stood there in a tiny little office that had been converted into a lab and we drilled a hole in the wall to suck the air out and stared at a server, which is about as exciting as looking at paint dry. I said, holy crap, we've solved this problem that nobody in 75 years of compute had ever solved.

  6. 12:50

    And that was one of the great minutes of my life. That's cool. When you look forward, like if you, so, you know, there's the wafer scale,