In the long saga that is the Cerebras Systems IPO, the finish line is finally in sight. The AI chip maker he said on Monday that it was preparing to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 a share. That would raise $3.5 billion and give it a market cap of $26.6 billion at the high end.
That would be a nice bump in just a few months for late investors who piled into the $1 billion Series H at a $23 billion valuation in February. It would also be a boon to OpenAI and some of its executives.
Should Cerebras make an initial public offering at or above the high, it would be the biggest tech IPO of 2026 so far. It could also prove the appetite for even bigger blockbusters in the wings, like SpaceX and possibly OpenAI and Anthropic.
Cerebras offers an AI-specific chip called Wafer-Scale Engine 3 that challenges GPU-based AI chips. Cerebras says its chip is faster for inference while using less power than such competitors. Inference is the computation required to process user prompts.
A long list of top investors stand to gain from a healthy IPO. Rick Gerson’s Alpha Wave? Benchmark (via contributor Eric Vishria); Lior Susan’s Eclipse; Fidelity; and Foundation Capital (through partner Steve Vassallo) are its largest shareholders at more than 5%, according to in the company’s SEC filing.
The company says its list of investors also includes 1789 Capital, Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Abu Dhabi’s G42, Altimeter, AMD, Atreides Management, Coatue, Moore Strategic Ventures, Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners and VY Capital.
In addition, the names of Cerebras his website a long list of angel investors, too. They include OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI founder and president Greg Brockman, former OpenAI chief scientist (now founder of his own AI startup) Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI board member and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Sun Microsystems and Arista Intel co-founder Andy BechO. light fixtures.
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Although Sam Altman’s stake was not large enough to be disclosed in SEC filings, it was reported on its S-1. That’s because Cerebras’ relationship with OpenAI is even more notable than its angel investors.
This relationship was even presented as evidence by Elon Musk in his OpenAI lawsuit. OpenAI had at one point considered acquiring Cerebras, according to legal filings from Musk’s lawyers who claim he was not aware of all OpenAI executives’ personal investments in the company.
That deal never happened, but OpenAI became one of Cerebras’ biggest customers. In fact, in December, OpenAI loaned Cerebras $1 billion, secured by warrants that allow OpenAI to buy more than 33 million shares, the S-1 reveals. So while OpenAI isn’t a big shareholder now, it could become.
Cerebras had hoped to go public in 2024, but was delayed by a federal review of an investment by Abu Dhabi-based cloud provider G42, which was (and still is, the chip company says) a major customer. This IPO attempt was eventually cancelled.
A year later, Cerebras tried to raise more cash. In September, pick up $1.1 billion at an $8.1 billion valuation after money led by Fidelity and Atreides. A few months later, Cerebras signed a new multi-year deal worth more than $10 billion with OpenAI, which included the loan and warrants. In February, it raised a $1 billion Series H, its latest mega round.
If investors eat up the IPO, then OpenAI and its executives will win in more ways than one.
That seems likely. Banks are already placing $10 billion worth of orders for the $3.5 billion worth of shares being offered, reports Bloomberg. That kind of demand suggests the company will likely price its stock even higher than that announced range, pulling in even more cash for itself and more value for its investors.
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