Report: AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems rekindles IPO plans, targeting early 2026 listing – News

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc. has not given up on its ambitions to go public, and could be preparing to file the paperwork for its U.S. initial public offering as early as this week, according to a report by Reuters late Friday.

The chipmaker, which develops high-performance silicon for AI training and inference, is said to be targeting the second-quarter of 2026 for its public debut.

Cerebras had originally planned to jump into the stock market last year, having filed for an IPO in September 2024. However, it later postponed its listing, before ultimately abandoning it in October, just days after closing on a $1.1 billion round of funding that brought its value to more than $8 billion.

The company first delayed and then canceled its first IPO plan following reports that one of its major investors, the United Arab Emirates-based conglomerate G42, was being investigated as part of a U.S. national security review. G42 is both an investor and a customer of Cerebras, and it has faced scrutiny by U.S. authorities over concerns that Middle East companies may provide China with backdoor access to American AI and chip technologies.

However, G42 has since obtained clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, and it’s no longer listed as one of Cerebras’ investors, Reuters reported. The developments have seemingly paved the way for the chipmaker to rekindle its IPO ambitions, and Reuters said anonymous sources at the company are eager to proceed as soon as possible.

The Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker is viewed as one of the most prominent rivals to Nvidia Corp. in the AI chip industry. It’s known for its unusual, dinner-plate-sized silicon chips, which are said to be much more powerful than the graphics processing units minted by its rival.

Its flagship chip is the Cerebras WSE-3 processor that debuted in March 2024. Built on a five-nanometer process, the chip features 1.4 trillion transistors and has over 900,000 compute cores – more than 50 times the number found on a single Nvidia H100 GPU. It also packs 44 gigabytes of onboard static random-access memory, which helps it to solve one of the major bottlenecks associated with Nvidia’s chips – bandwidth.

In May, the company updated its cloud-based AI inference service, which is designed to run trained AI models in production, claiming that it’s the fastest offering of its kind in the world. It said it can run the most powerful large language models at speeds of more than 2,000 tokens per second, which is much more rapid than Nvidia GPU-based inference services.

Given its reputation as one of the few viable alternatives to Nvidia’s silicon, it’s easy to see why Cerebras is keen to cash in. Investors have shown enormous appetite for AI startups over the last couple of years, and that demand has remained strong even amid the economic volatility caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs earlier this year.

However, Cerebras’ window of opportunity might be closing fast as talk of a “bubble” in the AI market refuses to go away. So far, IPO activity has helped up well, with new listings raising a combined $46.15 billion this year, excluding blank-check firms, data from Dealogic shows. That’s up 21% from the previous year.

Cerebras isn’t the only big name looking to cash in on a potential offering. Earlier this month, reports emerged that Elon Musk’s spacefaring company SpaceX Corp. is also eying an IPO next year.

Photo: Cerebras Systems