Jean-Philippe Fricker is one of the architects of wafer-scale computing. Co-founder and Chief System Architect of Cerebras Systems, he designs the hardware behind a class of machine built to challenge the dominant architecture of AI computing — a bet, when the company was founded in 2015, that was far from technically settled: fitting a single processor onto an entire silicon wafer. He previously designed three generations of fabric-based computer systems at SeaMicro, served as senior hardware architect at DSSD, acquired by EMC, and directed hardware engineering at Alcatel-Lucent and Riverstone Networks. He holds an MS in electrical engineering from EPFL and is the author of 42 patents. His attention is on the layer everything else rests on and the one forgotten fastest: physical architectures, manufacturing constraints, energy — and what it takes, in practice, to build computing capacity that entire domains of research and of the economy come to depend on.