Cerebras Systems, a maker of artificial intelligence chips, priced its IPO at $185 a share on Wednesday, above the expected range, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The deal comes as investors gear up for what’s expected to be a very busy year for new AI offerings.
The IPO reeled in at least $5.55 billion for Cerebras, which is hitting the market during a silicon renaissance. Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and memory maker Micron are each up more than 80% in the past month, and have notched much more dramatic gains over the last year as investors spread their chip bets from Nvidia to the wider universe of semiconductor companies now benefiting from the AI boom.
It’s also one of the largest tech IPOs in years. Uber raised about $8 billion in 2019, and the biggest since then for a U.S. tech company was Snowflake’s offering in 2020, which brought in over $3.8 billion. Expanding to include autos, electric vehicle maker Rivian raised roughly $12 billion in 2021.
At the IPO price, Cerebras is now worth $56.4 billion on a fully diluted basis. Andrew Feldman, Cerebras’ co-founder and CEO, now holds a stake worth about $1.9 billion.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, Cerebras has faced a rocky road getting to the Nasdaq, where it will trade under ticker symbol CBRS.
In September 2024 Cerebras filed to go public, but withdrew its submission a little over a year later after its prospectus was heavily scrutinized due largely to the company’s heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42.
Cerebras had started shifting its focus away from selling hardware systems and more toward providing a cloud service based on its chips. That means it’s going up against cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft, which are both listed as competitors, along with Oracle and CoreWeave.
In its refreshed prospectus, Cerebras said that 24% of revenue last year came from G42, down from 85% in 2024. However, last year Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE accounted for 62% of revenue.
Cerebras scored a big win in January, when it signed a deal with OpenAI worth over $20 billion for 750 megawatts in Cerebras computing capacity. Cerebras claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips offer speed and price advantages over graphics processing units, such as Nvidia’s.
On May 4, Cerebras said it was looking to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 per share. A week later, Cerebras bumped up the offering to 30 million and raised the expected range to $150 to $160.
Earlier on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources, that weeks before Cerebras’ IPO, Arm and SoftBank both attempted to acquire it. Cerebras declined to comment.
In 2017, OpenAI looked at merging with Cerebras, viewing the chip company as potentially beneficial in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, according to testimony in Elon Musk’s trial against OpenAI.
“Exclusive access to Cerebras hardware would give OpenAI an overwhelming hardware advantage over Google,” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, wrote in an email. Brockman held about 78,000 shares of Cerebras at the end of 2025, according to a filing in the case, which would be worth $14.4 million at the IPO price.
Other Cerebras investors include Fidelity, with a stake valued at about $3.8 billion, and Benchmark, which owns roughly $3.3 billion worth of shares. Foundation Capital’s holdings are valued at $2.8 billion, and Eclipse owns a $2.5 billion stake.
—CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
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