Inside, the heat is set to "morgue." We're led past rows of humming racks, the air thick with ozone and that weird tang of burnt plastic you only get from overclocked GPUs. Jian's eyes are everywhere, mapping the power lines, the cabling, the airflow. Maddy is talking to herself, rehearsing the integration steps. I'm trying not to think about how this was supposed to be the easy part.
We get to the cage where our little slab of silicon is going to live, and Jian sets the Pelican case on the table like it's a bomb. The Cerebras rep is already there, a twitchy guy named Arjun who looks like he hasn't slept since the Obama administration. He's got our config file open on his ThinkPad, and he's already annoyed by us.
"You're late," Arjun says, like he's the president of time.
"Sorry, we hit a deer," Maddy says, which is not true, but might as well be.
He grunts and waves us in. We start the integration dance. It's all power cycling and cable swapping and a lot of waiting for lights to turn green. Jian and Arjun are speaking a language that sounds like English but isn't. Maddy keeps refreshing her inbox, waiting for a test job to finish. I just stand there, staring at the racks, thinking about all the money and hope that's stacked up in these blinking lights.