$60B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning $8M a month

The headline frames Cerebras as a standard underdog story, but it obscures the brutal capital moat this $60B IPO just validated for the AI hardware market. Surviving an $8M monthly burn rate to build an "impossible" chip mechanically sets a new financial baseline that locks out early-stage competitors and forces venture capital to concentrate on a few massive silicon bets. As funding pools into these extreme-risk hardware ventures, the secondary effect will be a rapid bottlenecking of the specialized manufacturing supply chains required to physically build them. Here is why this liquidity event quietly redraws the global compute map.