Cerebras bumps up IPO range as it looks to raise up to $4.8 billion

Artificial intelligence chip maker Cerebras Systems increases its estimated price range initial public offering. According to a statement on Monday, the company now plans to sell between $150 and $160 per share, down from the $115 to $125 range it announced last week.

At the high end of the new range, Cerebras will raise up to $4.8 billion through the IPO. The company is expected to be valued at up to $48.8 billion on a fully diluted basis. That’s on top of the $23 billion valuation the company announced in February as part of its financing round.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, have become the industry standard among companies looking to train and run generative AI models like those powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Cerebras says its chips perform faster and cost less than GPUs. The fast speeds that Cerebras advertises helped the company win a commitment of over $20 billion from OpenAI, which relied on Cerebras for a code-writing model.

Instead of focusing on selling hardware, Cerebras fills data centers with its own chips and provides cloud services to its customers. This puts it at odds with cloud infrastructure providers. However, in March the upper cloud Amazon Web Services announced a deal to bring Cerebras chips to data centers.

Cerebras gained more attention during the hearing of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, told a California courtroom last week that Cerebras’ planned chips represent “the computing we think we’re going to need.” Brockman said OpenAI has discussed merging with Cerebras and Musk is open to a deal.

Nasdaq expects the Cerebras IPO to take place on May 14.

— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.

WRISTWATCH: “It’s a good time to get involved in AI hardware,” says Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras Systems