By Max A. Cherney
(Reuters) – Silicon Valley firm Cerebras Systems on Wednesday said it will supply a supercomputing system to Aleph Alpha, a German technology startup that will use it to develop artificial intelligence for the German Armed Forces.
Cerebras has created a computing system that aims to rival Nvidia for training AI systems with huge amounts of data. The company has previously won a deal to supply G42, the government-backed firm in the United Arab Emirates, with AI supercomputers, though those machines will be physically located in the United States.
By contrast, the deal with Aleph Alpha, a leading AI firm viewed as among Europe’s rivals to U.S. firms such as OpenAI, will involve shipping Cerebras supercomputers to a secure data center in Germany, the first time that a Cerebras system has been installed in Europe.
“The German Armed Forces is a top-tier customer, and Aleph Alpha is one of the AI leaders,” Cerebras Chief Executive Andrew Feldman told Reuters. “The competition was fierce.”
The two companies did not give a value for the deal but described it as a multi-year agreement in which Cerebras would help Aleph Alpha train generative AI models for the German Armed Forces.
“Like most companies, armed forces are looking for world class AI,” Feldman said. “They’re looking to train models (for) language, vision (and) multi-data type models.”
(Reporting by Max Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Sam Holmes)