Cerebras, Groq, SambaNova: The Inference Hardware Insurgents
For most of the last decade, talking about AI hardware meant talking about Nvidia. In 2026 that has stopped being true at the inference layer. Three companies - Cerebras, Groq, and SambaNova - have built genuinely different chips around the same insight: that the workload economics of running models in production are not the same as the workload economics of training them, and that the chip architecture should follow the workload. The bet has been right enough that Nvidia has now licensed pieces of it. ...