If the acquisition had happened, it could have benefited both companies. Cerebras would’ve avoided the path to a tricky IPO, while OpenAI might’ve had a vital resource in its race to build in-house chips.

OpenAI has long sought to reduce its reliance on Nvidia, which commands a massive share of the market for AI-optimized chips. While OpenAI is late to the in-house chip game — Google and Amazon Web Services, among others, have long offered chips designed for AI workloads — it’s under pressure to reduce the cost of model training, fine-tuning, and running. Having its own chips could be one way to attain the reductions it needs.