Cerebras CEO to Tackle AI's Scaling Wall at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems, is set to take the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to address one of the industry's most pressing questions: can artificial intelligence keep scaling at its current pace?

The session will focus on the pressure that AI growth is putting on the physical world. Demand for compute keeps climbing, and with it the need for electricity, data center space and supporting infrastructure. Those constraints are increasingly shaping what AI companies can build and how fast they can build it.

Feldman is expected to lay out how Cerebras approaches the problem differently from the rest of the market. The company is best known for its wafer-scale engine, a processor built from an entire silicon wafer rather than a small die cut from one. That design contrasts with the GPU-based clusters that dominate AI training and inference today, and Cerebras has positioned it as a way to deliver more performance while easing some of the bottlenecks that come with stitching together thousands of smaller chips.

The talk will also look ahead. If current AI hardware reaches its practical limits, what replaces it, and how should the industry prepare? That question matters well beyond chip designers. Cloud providers, model developers and governments are all committing enormous sums to data centers and power supply, betting that today's architectures can carry them through the next wave of growth.

Feldman is a natural voice for the debate. Cerebras has built its business on the argument that specialized hardware can do AI work more efficiently than general-purpose alternatives, and it competes directly with market leader Nvidia. His view on where the real ceilings lie, whether in chips, power grids or cost, will be closely watched by founders and investors in the audience.

Disrupt has long served as a venue for startups and established players to stake out positions on where technology is heading. With AI infrastructure spending now among the biggest stories in tech, Feldman's appearance adds a hardware-focused perspective to a conversation that is often dominated by models and software.