Cerebras prices IPO above expected range, Wall Street expects AI flood
Cerebras Systems, a maker of artificial intelligence chips, priced its IPO on Wednesday at $185 per share, according to a person with knowledge of the matter; this was above the expected range. The deal comes as investors prepare for what is expected to be a busy year for new AI offerings.
Launched during the silicon renaissance, Cerebras’ IPO raised at least $5.55 billion. Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and memory maker Micron They are up more than 80% each in the past month, prompting investors to cut their chip bets. Nvidia to the broader universe of semiconductor companies now capitalizing on the AI boom.
It is also one of the biggest technology IPOs of recent years. Uber It raised nearly $8 billion in 2019, the biggest for a U.S. tech company since then. Snowflake The offering generated over $3.8 billion in revenue in 2020. Expands to include cars and electric vehicle maker rivya It raised nearly $12 billion in 2021.
At its IPO price, Cerebras is now valued at $56.4 billion on a fully diluted basis. Cerebras co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman currently owns shares worth approximately $1.9 billion.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, Cerebras faced a tough road on its way to Nasdaq, where it will trade under the symbol CBRS.
In September 2024, Cerebras filed to go public, but a little more than a year later withdrew its offering after its prospectus came under intense scrutiny, largely due to the company’s heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42.
Cerebras had begun to shift its focus from selling hardware systems to providing a cloud service based on its chips. This means it will go up against cloud providers like Google And MicrosoftBoth are listed as competitors along with Oracle and CoreWeave.
Cerebras said in its renewed prospectus that 24% of last year’s revenue came from G42, down from 85% in 2024. But last year, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE accounted for 62% of revenue.
Cerebras scored a big win in January, signing a deal with OpenAI worth over $20 billion for 750 megawatts of Cerebra’s computing capacity. Cerebras claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips offer a speed and price advantage over graphics processing units like Nvidia’s.
On May 4, Cerebras announced plans to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 per share. A week later, Cerebras increased the bid to 30 million, increasing the expected range to $150 to $160.
In the early hours of Wednesday, Bloomberg Weeks before Cerebras’ IPO, it was reported, citing unnamed sources: Arm And SoftBank They both tried to get it. Cerebras declined to comment.
OpenAI considered a merger with Cerebras in 2017, viewing the chip company as potentially useful in its pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to testimony in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.
“Exclusive access to Cerebras hardware will give OpenAI a huge hardware advantage over Google,” OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman wrote in an email. According to the lawsuit, Brockman held approximately 78,000 shares of Cerebras at the end of 2025, which would have been worth $14.4 million at the IPO price.
Other Cerebras investors include Fidelity, which values the stock at about $3.8 billion, and Benchmark, which owns shares worth about $3.3 billion. Foundation Capital’s assets are valued at $2.8 billion and Eclipse has $2.5 billion worth of shares.
—CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
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