You're pointing out a bunch of high capex costs (hardware, SRAM), but then concluding that their opEx is greater than their revenue on a per unit basis. Are they really losing money on every token? It seems that using hardware acceleration would decrease inference costs and they could make it up on unit economics over time.
But I'm just reasoning from first principles. I don't have any specific data about them.
There are degrees of acceleration. My understanding, limited as it is, is that groq and cerebras are using highly optimized acceleration to achieve their token generation rates, far beyond that in a regular GPU, and this leads to lower costs per token.
Is this incorrect?
Yes, they're called ASICs on Grog. But Cerebras has more general cores that can do more complex things. Inference is mostly limited by bandwidth though.