
The Scoop
California chipmaker Cerebras Systems, a crucial partner in Abu Dhabi’s AI ambitions, is hiring engineers to work in the UAE and looking to install its hardware in the massive UAE-US AI Campus now under construction.
The AI chips firm wants 50 employees — up from 18 working in Abu Dhabi and Dubai currently — by next year, primarily working in systems and hardware roles. Cerebras is also targeting 40 megawatts of computing power available in Abu Dhabi, a spokesperson told Semafor.
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Cerebras’ expansion plans come as part of a growing UAE-US technology alliance, with a colossal data center project in Abu Dhabi — announced during US President Donald Trump’s May visit to the Gulf — anchoring the relationship.
Put into the context of the planned 5 gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus, the scale of Cerebras’ ambition is small: less than 1% of the campus’s total eventual capacity. But it is still significant: 40MW is large enough to run some of the world’s fastest computers. The US government-funded Frontier supercomputer, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for example, operates on less power.
But export rules for cutting-edge chips from the US to foreign customers, including G42, remain undefined, to the frustration of technology executives like Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman, who told Semafor “practical solutions” can reduce the threat of cutting-edge chips from the US finding their way to China. Feldman said he expects the Trump administration to “with time” come up with a plan to greenlight exports to allies.
“We are in a competitive battle,” he said, adding that he believes it is “very much in the US interest” to deploy its full range of computing infrastructure to the Gulf, Central, and Southeast Asia.
Earlier this month, Cerebras pulled its prospectus to go public.
Feldman said he now plans to refile “as soon as possible” with updated financial information, but declined to give a specific timeline. Some investors in the latest funding round were not named in the 2024 filing, Feldman wrote in a LinkedIn post. Those investors include 1789 Capital, where Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.
Step Back
Cerebras, which makes a large-scale AI chip and counts Abu Dhabi AI conglomerate G42 as its largest customer, raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion last month, money it is pouring into ramping up manufacturing and expansion.
The Series G round doubled its value from 2021 — a year before OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm — and when G42, through an affiliate, acquired a 1% stake in Cerebras for $40 million, valuing the company at $4 billion.
G42 houses a significant portion of its computing capacity in the US, on a supercomputer network built with Cerebras called Condor Galaxy, relying on it to train its Arabic large language model, Jais, and for parts of its newest model K2 Think.
Two years after G42 purchased a stake, it also became a significant customer: The Emirati firm has accounted for at least 80% of revenue since 2023, a figure Feldman acknowledged is “a lot” but said the AI industry lends itself to large buyers. “We happen to have found one and built a strategic partnership with [G42], but we’ll go and get some others too.”

Notable
- G42 had built up four times the computing capacity in the US compared to the UAE at this time last year, Semafor previously reported, forged out of its relationship to Cerebras.