By Adam Levine
On Friday, artificial-intelligence chipmaker and cloud provider Cerebras filed a prospectus for an initial public offering, marking its second attempt after withdrawing a 2024 filing last year.
The company intends to list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "CBRS."
Cerebras is entering a crowded field of AI-chip makers competing with Nvidia's industry-leading graphics processing units, but it has a differentiated product: the Wafer-Scale Engine, or WSE. While normally hundreds or thousands of chips are made from a 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the WSE takes up the whole wafer, producing one dinner-plate-sized chip.
One of the main bottlenecks in AI is the connection between computing and memory, and Cerebras addresses this by placing both AI computing cores and memory on the same silicon slab, enabling extremely high memory bandwidth. However, this design also has limitations: the 44 gigabytes of memory on each chip can accommodate only smaller, less complex models than competing setups, such as Nvidia's 72-GPU servers.
For smaller AI models that can fit on the chip, the WSE delivers high inference speeds -- the process of running models that power applications such as chatbots and coding agents.
Cerebras sells servers built around WSE, and also rents them out in the cloud. The company is trying to move more into being primarily a cloud provider, though its 2025 hardware sales were still more than double its cloud revenue.
To date, Cerebras has three customers and a backlog totaling $25 billion, dominated by a $20 billion cloud contract with OpenAI to run smaller models, such as its speedy Codex-Spark coding models. According to OpenAI, the Cerebras chip delivers "near-instant feedback in live coding environments."
Cerebras also has deals with two arms of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. The company's first customer, Emirati AI firm G42, was established by Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The more recent buyer is Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. Together, these UAE entities accounted for 86% of Cerebras' 2025 sales, and MBZUAI represented 78% of accounts receivable at the end of the year.
Cerebras also has a deal with Amazon Web Services to host its WSE in the cloud, though the scale of the partnership hasn't been dislosed.
Cerebras had $510 million in 2025 sales, up 76% from the year before. The company still had an operating loss of $146 million, but its operating loss margin improved from minus 35% to minus 29%.
The company expects to convert $3.7 billion of its backlog to revenue in 2026 and 2027.
One red flag in the prospectus is that that the company "identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting," a disclosure commonly seen in IPO filings as companies prepare for the stricter accounting standards required of public firms.
The disclosure may carry additional weight given Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman's history.
Formerly the vice president of a company called Riverstone Networks, in 2006 he was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of being part of a plot to fraudulently recognize $30 million in revenue. In 2007, he pleaded guilty to one count of circumventing accounting controls and paid $289,507 plus interest in disgorgement the following year. As part of the settlement, Feldman neither admitted nor denied the SEC's allegations, and unlike some of his co-defendants, he was not barred from serving as an officer of a public company for five years.
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 20, 2026 11:29 ET (15:29 GMT)
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