In the long saga that is Cerebras Systems’ IPO, the finish line is finally in sight. The AI chip maker said on Monday, it is preparing to sell 28 million shares at between $115 and $125 per share. That would raise $3.5 billion and give it a high-end market cap of $26.6 billion.
This would be a great step forward in just a few months for the latest investors who rushed into his project. $1 billion, Series H at a valuation of $23 billion in February. It would also be a boon for OpenAI and some of its leaders.
If Cerebras pulls off an IPO at or above the high end, it will be the largest tech IPO of 2026 to date. It could also prove the appetite for even bigger blockbuster offerings, 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 claims its chip is faster for inference while using less power than its competitors. Inference is the computation required to process user prompts.
A long list of big-name investors stands to gain from a healthy IPO. Alpha Wave by Rick Gerson; Benchmark (via his partner Eric Vishria); The Eclipse of Lior Susan; Loyalty; and Foundation Capital (via its partner Steve Vassallo) are its main shareholders with a stake of more than 5%, according to to the company’s filing with the SEC.
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.
Additionally, the names of Cerebras on his website a long list of angel investors as well. These include OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI founder and chairman 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 co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, and several others technological luminaries.
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Although Sam Altman’s stake is not large enough to be disclosed in SEC filings, he was named in his S-1. Indeed, Cerebras’ relationship with OpenAI is even more remarkable than that of its angel investors.
This relationship has even been presented as evidenced by Elon Musk in his lawsuit with OpenAI. OpenAI had at one point considered acquiring Cerebras, according to legal documents filed by Musk’s lawyers that claim he was unaware of all of 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 purchase more than 33 million shares, the S-1 reveals. So even though OpenAI is not currently a significant shareholder, it could become one.
Cerebras had hoped to go public in 2024, but was delayed due to a federal review of an investment from Abu Dhabi-based cloud provider G42, which was (and still is, according to the chip company) a major customer. This IPO attempt was ultimately abandoned.
A year later, Cerebras was looking to raise more cash. In September, he raised $1.1 billion on an $8.1 billion post-money valuation led by Fidelity and Atreides. A few months later, Cerebras signed its new multi-year agreement worth more more than 10 billion dollars with OpenAI which included the loan and the warrants. In February, it raised the $1 billion Series H, its latest mega funding round.
If investors accept the IPO, then OpenAI and its leaders stand to gain in more ways than one.
This seems likely. Banks have already fielded orders worth $10 billion for the $3.5 billion worth of shares on offer, reports Bloomberg. This type of demand indicates that the company will likely price its shares even higher than this stated range, thereby reaping even more cash for itself and more value for its investors.
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