Twenty Years of Compute: From Virtual Machines to Intelligence

Over the past twenty years, compute has mostly done one thing: moved profit up the stack — first past machines, then past software, and now past large models themselves. Cerebras has just gone public. In intraday trading on its first day, the stock nearly doubled, and its market cap briefly touched about $95 billion. On the same news tape, Nvidia paid roughly $20 billion at the end of 2025 to…