Cerebras files for IPO on Nasdaq after pulling paperwork in 2025
Cerebras finally made the move the market had been waiting for 👀
The AI chip maker filed paperwork on Friday to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker CBRS, and the timing could not be more interesting.
That is because this is not the first time the company has tried to make this move.
Back in 2024, Cerebras had already announced IPO plans, but pulled all its documentation in 2025 to update financial performance data and strategy. Now, with much stronger numbers in hand and a multibillion-dollar contract with OpenAI on the table, the company is back in full force.
And the landscape for this move is quite favorable.
The artificial intelligence market is hotter than ever, and investors are hungry for tech IPOs after a long dry spell that started back in 2022. Cerebras arrives at this moment with a proposition that sets it apart from competitors, impressive financial growth, and partnerships that catch the eye of even those who do not follow the sector closely.
It is worth understanding what is behind all of this 🚀
The financial numbers Cerebras brought to its IPO
If the financial story behind Cerebras still raised doubts in 2024, the 2025 data tells a completely different narrative. The company reported revenue of 510 million dollars last year, a jump of nearly 76% compared to 2024. Even more impressive: the company posted a net income of 87.9 million dollars, reversing a 485 million dollar loss that had marked the prior year.
This leap is significant because it shows that Cerebras is not just growing revenue but has also found a path to profitability, something many AI infrastructure companies are still struggling to achieve. According to the filing with the SEC, the company had 24.6 billion dollars in remaining performance obligations as of December 31, with the expectation of recognizing 15% of that amount through 2026 and 2027.
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These numbers give the market a clear picture that Cerebras has a sizeable pipeline of future revenue, which helps justify the 23 billion dollar valuation the company received in its 1 billion dollar funding round completed in February. For comparison, in September 2025, just days before withdrawing the previous IPO paperwork, the company had raised a 1.1 billion dollar round at an 8.1 billion dollar valuation. The difference between those two moments speaks for itself.
Customer concentration and the UAE factor
One of the biggest points of concern during Cerebras’ first IPO attempt back in 2024 was extreme revenue concentration. At the time, the company revealed that G42, a United Arab Emirates-based company backed by Microsoft, accounted for 87% of revenue in the first half of that year. That made a lot of investors uneasy, because it essentially meant that nearly all of the company’s income depended on a single customer.
The 2025 numbers show that things have shifted, though with caveats. G42’s share of revenue dropped to 24%. However, another UAE-based client took center stage: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a public institution, accounted for 62% of revenue in 2025.
In other words, geographic concentration in the UAE remains a relevant risk factor in the company’s analysis. Still, the diversification across different clients within that market, combined with new contracts in other regions, signals that Cerebras is working to broaden its customer base more evenly in the coming years.
What makes Cerebras different in the chip market
When most people think about chips for artificial intelligence, the name that comes to mind is Nvidia. But Cerebras built a completely different approach, and it is precisely that difference that has been drawing so much attention.
While Nvidia relies on GPUs that process data in parallel across smaller, interconnected chips, Cerebras went in the opposite direction and created the Wafer Scale Engine, a massive chip that takes up nearly the entire area of a silicon wafer. The result is a processor with an enormous amount of memory and data bandwidth, making it especially efficient for training and running large artificial intelligence models.
According to the company’s own website, the Wafer Scale Engine 3 delivers faster speeds and lower costs compared to traditional GPUs. This advantage is particularly relevant for inference, which is basically running an already-trained AI model to generate responses. Cerebras systems can generate tokens at speeds far exceeding those of conventional GPU-based solutions, placing the company in a very attractive position for clients that need real-time responses.
The company has actually been winning new business precisely by highlighting the high speeds that its large-scale processors can deliver, especially for serving end-user queries.
The business model evolution: from chip seller to cloud provider
One of the most important moves Cerebras has made in recent years has been the shift in its business model. For a long time, the company focused on selling chips directly to enterprises. Now, Cerebras also operates its own data centers and offers computing power as a cloud service to its customers.
This transition puts the company in direct competition with giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Oracle, and CoreWeave. It is a much more complex game than just manufacturing hardware, but it is also a path with potentially higher margins and more lasting customer relationships.
An important detail from the SEC filing is that Cerebras does not own the data centers it uses to offer cloud services, although it mentioned the possibility of building its own facilities in the future. This dependence on third-party infrastructure is something investors will certainly keep a close eye on.
The multibillion-dollar contract with OpenAI
The standout highlight among Cerebras’ partnerships is, without a doubt, the deal with OpenAI. In January, the company announced plans to supply up to 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI by 2028, in a contract valued at more than 20 billion dollars.
The agreement calls for Cerebras to deliver 250 megawatts per year between 2026 and 2028. On top of that, OpenAI has the option to purchase an additional 1.25 gigawatts of computing power from Cerebras by 2030. Cerebras itself acknowledges in the filing that this alliance represents a substantial portion of its projected revenue for the next several years.
The relationship between the two companies goes beyond a simple service contract. In December, Cerebras issued OpenAI warrants to purchase up to 33.4 million shares of its Class N stock, which carry no voting rights. In January, Cerebras received a 1 billion dollar loan from OpenAI at a 6% annual interest rate, earmarked for building data center infrastructure. That loan can be repaid in cash or through the delivery of products and services. The warrants only become fully exercisable if OpenAI purchases 2 gigawatts of computing power from Cerebras.
Currently, Cerebras provides OpenAI with cloud-based computing power to run an AI-assisted coding tool.
But heads up: OpenAI has the right to terminate part or all of the agreement if Cerebras fails to deliver the computing power on schedule or if the service falls below a certain quality standard. That adds a layer of risk that investors need to factor in.
New partnerships with Amazon and Oracle on the radar
Beyond OpenAI, Cerebras has been expanding its partnerships with other tech giants. In March, the company struck a deal with Amazon that enables the offering of cloud services powered by Cerebras chips. As part of that agreement, Amazon may acquire roughly 270 million dollars in Class N shares of the company.
In the case of Oracle, the situation is a bit murkier. During the March earnings call, Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Clay Magouyrk mentioned that the database and cloud company offers Cerebras chips among its suppliers. However, at the time, Oracle’s price list did not include any references to Cerebras, and the filing submitted on Friday does not mention any formal deal with Oracle either.
The market is watching and hungry for more
The Cerebras IPO arrives at a moment when retail and institutional investors are hungry for new public offerings from fast-growing tech companies. Since 2022, the market has gone through a considerable IPO drought in the sector, and the pent-up demand is obvious.
Other artificial intelligence companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are also reportedly considering going public as early as 2026, which could kick off a new wave of offerings in the segment. The market’s reception of the Cerebras IPO could serve as a barometer for those other companies waiting in line.
Investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS are among the lead underwriters for the offering. Additionally, earlier this week, Cerebras secured from Morgan Stanley a revolving credit facility of up to 250 million dollars, with an option to increase the limit to 850 million after the IPO.
Who is behind Cerebras
Cerebras was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with 708 employees as of December 31, 2025. Cofounder and CEO Andrew Feldman is no newcomer to the chip industry. He sold the server startup SeaMicro to AMD for 355 million dollars in 2012.
Feldman has also revealed that in 2018, Elon Musk attempted to acquire Cerebras, which gives a sense of the potential the company was already showing in its early years.
Among the company’s investors are heavyweight names like Alpha Wave, Benchmark, Eclipse, Fidelity, and Foundation Capital. The Cerebras website also lists Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as an investor, further underscoring the depth of the relationship between the two companies.
Why this IPO matters for the artificial intelligence sector
The move by Cerebras goes well beyond a company seeking capital from the market. This IPO serves as a real-world barometer of how investors view the future of artificial intelligence infrastructure. After years with very few notable public offerings in the tech sector, the market was clearly bottled up, and companies like Cerebras are arriving at a moment when there is genuine appetite from funds, asset managers, and individual investors who want exposure to AI growth without necessarily betting only on the big established names.
What makes this picture even more compelling is that Cerebras represents a bet on the chip and infrastructure layer, which is historically one of the most defensible positions within the tech ecosystem. Companies that control the hardware where artificial intelligence runs have a massive structural advantage, because every application, every model, every AI platform needs physical processing underneath it. As models get bigger and use cases grow more complex, the demand for specialized chips only increases.
The success of this IPO could open doors for other companies in the sector that have been waiting for a green light from the market. The AI infrastructure startup ecosystem is packed with companies that have solid technology but have not yet made the leap to the public markets. If Cerebras gets a warm reception on the Nasdaq, it sets an important precedent and could accelerate a new wave of public offerings in the artificial intelligence space, which would be great news for anyone following the sector closely and looking for more investment options in companies shaping the future of technology 🤖
