Cerebras files for IPO

Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Monday filed its prospectus for an initial public offering, with plans to trade under the ticker symbol “CBRS” on the Nasdaq.

Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are frequently chosen for training and running AI models. Cerebras says on its website that its WSE-3 chip comes with more cores and memory than Nvidia’s popular H100. The Cerebras component is also much larger in size. In addition to selling chips, Cerebras offers cloud-based services that rely on its own computing clusters.

It’s a growing and crowded market: Cloud providers Amazon, Google and Microsoft have developed their own AI chips. The company said that Group 42, an UAE-based AI firm that counts Microsoft as an investor, accounted for 83% of the company’s revenue last year.

According to the filing, Cerebras had a net loss of $66.6 million in the first six months of 2024 on $136.4 million in sales. For 2023, the company reported a net loss of $127 million on revenue of $78.7 million.

Cerebras was founded in 2016 and is based in Sunnyvale, California. Andrew Feldman, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, sold server startup SeaMicro to AMD for $355 million in 2012.

The company said in 2021 that it was valued at over $4 billion in a $250 million funding round. Investors include the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Altimeter Capital, Benchmark, Coatue, Foundation Capital, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

The technology IPO market has generally been sparse in 2024, as higher interest rates pushed investors toward profitable assets. Social media app Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March, and data management software maker Rubrik followed in April. Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve pushed ahead with its first rate cut since 2020, prompting gains in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index.

WATCH: Cerebras CEO: Our inference offering is 20x faster than Nvidia’s and a fraction of the price