AI chipmaker Cerebras targets up to $4bn IPO at $40bn valuation
After a CFIUS-induced retreat in 2024, the wafer-scale chip startup is back with an OpenAI deal in its pocket and a sharper bet against Nvidia.
A Cautionary Tale to a Game Changer
Eighteen months ago, Cerebras Systems looked like a cautionary tale. The Sunnyvale-based AI chip startup had filed for an initial public offering in September 2024, only to see its plans stall under a national-security review of its largest customer. By October 2025, the registration was withdrawn. The company, which makes the largest commercial silicon chip in the world, was not so much beaten as quietly removed from the field.
It is back now, and considerably more ambitious.
A New Deal and a Sharp Valuation
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Cerebras is seeking to raise as much as $4bn in its IPO, at a valuation of roughly $40bn, citing people familiar with the matter. The figure is striking. It is nearly five times the $8.1bn private-market valuation Cerebras commanded as recently as September 2025, and well above the $22bn to $25bn band industry analysts had expected.
Cerebras intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker CBRS, with Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS Investment Bank as joint book-running managers. If pricing holds, this would be the first major AI hardware listing of 2026 and one of the largest US technology debuts in recent memory.
The Power of an OpenAI Agreement
Much of the new appetite traces to a single contract. In its updated prospectus, Cerebras disclosed a multi-year compute agreement with OpenAI worth more than $10bn over its term, covering up to 750 megawatts of inference capacity through 2028.
For a company that booked $510m in revenue in 2025, up 76 per cent on the prior year, the deal is transformative. It also explains, in part, the leap in valuation: Cerebras now has the kind of anchor customer that investors prize above almost any other signal in the AI infrastructure market.
The OpenAI agreement does not displace Nvidia, which remains the dominant supplier of the GPUs powering most of the industry’s training workloads. But it does give Cerebras a credible foothold in inference, the part of the AI stack where compute is run, not built, and where margin pressure is mounting fastest.
From Geopolitics to Game Changer
Cerebras’s first IPO attempt collapsed not over technology but over geopolitics. Abu Dhabi-based G42, an AI conglomerate with prior ties to Chinese partners, had become the company’s largest customer and a sizeable shareholder, accounting for 87 per cent of Cerebras’s revenue in the first half of 2024. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States opened a review of G42’s stake, and Cerebras paused its filing. CNBC reported that CFIUS clearance was finally granted on 31 March 2025, after G42 divested its Chinese investments.