Meta & Cerebras Unleash AI Speed—18x Faster Than GPU-based Solutions

Meta has officially teamed up with Cerebras Systems to supercharge its Llama API, delivering inference speeds up to 18 times faster than traditional GPU-based solutions. This move positions Meta to compete directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI inference market, where developers purchase tokens to power their applications.

Cerebras Systems is a cutting-edge Al hardware company specializing in wafer-scale computing, designed to accelerate deep learning and Al inference. Their Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) is the largest semiconductor chip ever built, offering unprecedented speed and efficiency compared to traditional GPUs.

The Cerebras system enables over 2,600 tokens per second for Llama 4 Scout, compared to 130 tokens per second for ChatGPT and 25 tokens per second for DeepSeek. This speed boost unlocks real-time AI applications, including low-latency voice systems, interactive code generation, and instant multi-step reasoning.

This collaboration positions Cerebras as a major player in Al infrastructure, challenging Nvidia's dominance in Al hardware.

Meta’s shift from just providing open-source models to offering a full-service AI infrastructure marks a significant strategic evolution.

Meta’s partnership with Cerebras Systems could significantly reshape AI development. For an instance, with over 2,600 tokens per second, this collaboration enables real-time AI applications that were previously impractical. Developers can now build low-latency voice assistants, interactive code generation tools, and instant multi-step reasoning systems.

Traditional AI inference relies heavily on GPUs, but Cerebras’ Wafer-Scale Engine offers an alternative that could challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware. This shift might encourage more companies to explore custom AI chips for efficiency gains.

For an uninitiated, AI inference is the process where a trained AI model applies its learned knowledge to make predictions or decisions on new data. It’s essentially the "thinking" phase of AI—where it takes what it learned during training and uses it in real-world applications.

By integrating Cerebras’ speed into the Llama API, Meta is making high-performance AI more accessible to developers worldwide. This could accelerate innovation across industries, from quick commerce automation to climate modeling—areas you’ve explored extensively.

Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras, said, “Cerebras is proud to make Llama API the fastest inference API in the world. Developers building agentic and real-time apps need speed. With Cerebras on Llama API, they can build AI systems that are fundamentally out of reach for leading GPU-based inference clouds.”

Cerebras is the fastest AI inference solution as measured by third party benchmarking site Artificial Analysis, reaching over 2,600 token/s for Llama 4 Scout compared to ChatGPT at ~130 tokens/sec and DeepSeek at ~25 tokens/sec.