Cerebras could be the next hot chip stock as demand swells ahead of its IPO

MW Cerebras could be the next hot chip stock as demand swells ahead of its IPO

By Britney Nguyen

The IPO may be the largest of the year once it takes place later this week

Cerebras is expected to start trading on Thursday.

As Cerebras Systems prepares for its initial public offering this week, the company expects to sell shares at a higher price than previously targeted. It's a sign of investors' fervent interest in the chip sector.

The maker of artificial-intelligence chips said in a filing on Monday that it is looking to offer 30 million shares at between $150 and $160 each, whereas it had previously planned to offer 28 million shares at between $115 and $125. Cerebras is expected to start trading under the ticker "CBRS" on Thursday.

The upsized targets mean Cerebras could raise up to $4.8 billion, which would make it the largest IPO worldwide so far this year in terms of gross proceeds, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Czechoslovak Group (CZ:CSG) currently holds that title, raising 3.8 billion euros in January, or about $4.5 billion. The largest U.S. IPO so far this year was Madison Air Solutions $(MAIR)$, which raised $2.2 billion in April, the data showed.

Cerebras's IPO comes as hyperscalers are boosting spending on chips and other infrastructure to support the AI data-center buildout. After the latest round of earnings reports, the collective capital expenditures of the four major cloud providers is approaching $700 billion.

See more: Big Tech's $700 billion spending on AI this year is called the 'greatest capital misallocation in history'

While Nvidia's (NVDA) graphics processing units have so far dominated the market for AI chips for training, the hardware market seems more competitive thanks to the shift to agentic AI and inference, which is the process of running AI models after training. Cerebras says its solution is 15 times faster than the leading GPU-based offering.

Cerebras is focused on supporting inference workloads, and unlike Nvidia and other AI-chip makers, its approach to chip-making involves using an entire wafer as one chip.

The company said in its S-1 filing that this technique, known as wafer-scale integration, allows it "to bring together quantities of compute and memory never before assembled on a single commercial chip and deliver AI at previously unimaginable speeds."

By keeping a chip on one wafer instead of cutting the wafer into multiple chips as is usually done, Cerebras said it can provide faster computing with more power efficiency and lower latency. Previous attempts to commercialize this approach to chip-making have failed, the company said, adding that its offering is "the world's first and only commercialized wafer-scale processor."

Cerebras operates its own data centers and cloud services, but its chips can also be utilized through partners, including Amazon.com (AMZN) Web Services. In January, Cerebras announced a multiyear deal to deploy 750 megawatts of its systems with OpenAI that it said is worth more than $20 billion. The two companies also agreed to codesign future AI models to work with Cerebras's hardware.

This marks the second time Cerebras has attempted to go public. The company first filed to go public in September 2024 before withdrawing those plans.

-Britney Nguyen

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May 11, 2026 13:44 ET (17:44 GMT)

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