Cerebras Systems priced its initial public offering at $185 a share on Wednesday, above the expected range, raising $5.55 billion and giving the AI chip maker a fully diluted market value of $56.4 billion, according to CNBC.
The offering is one of the largest tech IPOs in years. For comparison, Uber raised about $8 billion in its 2019 IPO, Snowflake brought in over $3.8 billion in 2020, and electric-vehicle maker Rivian raised roughly $12 billion in 2021. Cerebras sold 30 million shares, and underwriters have the option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares.
The company's path to the Nasdaq, where it will trade under the ticker symbol CBRS, was not straightforward. Cerebras first filed to go public in September 2024 but withdrew its submission a little over a year later after its prospectus drew heavy scrutiny, largely because of the company's reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42. In a 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.
As recently as May 4, Cerebras had said it was looking to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 per share. A week later, the company bumped the offering to 30 million shares and raised the expected range to $150 to $160, before ultimately pricing above even that revised range.
Co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman holds a stake worth about $1.9 billion at the IPO price. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Silicon Valley.
Cerebras has also been shifting its business model, moving away from selling hardware systems and toward providing a cloud service based on its chips, putting it in competition with Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and CoreWeave. The company claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips offer speed and price advantages over graphics processing units, including those made by Nvidia.
The company scored a significant contract in January, signing a deal with OpenAI worth over $20 billion for 750 megawatts in Cerebras computing capacity. Earlier on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources, that weeks before the IPO, both Arm and SoftBank attempted to acquire Cerebras. Cerebras declined to comment on that report.
The IPO arrives during a broad surge in semiconductor stocks. Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and memory maker Micron are each up more than 80% in the past month, as investors have spread their chip bets from Nvidia to a wider range of semiconductor companies benefiting from the AI boom. Wall Street is also bracing for what is expected to be a heavy year of new AI-related public offerings.
