Cerebras, an AI chipmaker, announces plans to go public and compete with Nvidia.

• On Monday, Cerebras Systems, an artificial intelligence chip startup, filed its prospectus for an initial public offering.
• It intends to trade under the symbol "CBRS" on the Nasdaq.
• In the first six months of 2024, Cerebras recorded a net loss of $66.6 million on $136.4 million in sales, according to the filing. The company's net loss was $77.8 million with $8.7 million in sales a year prior.

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

Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are widely used for training and running AI models. Cerebras claims that its WSE-3 chip has more cores, memory, and is physically larger than Nvidia's H100. Besides selling chips, Cerebras provides cloud-based services that utilize its own computing clusters.

AI chips are becoming increasingly popular in the crowded market, with companies such as NVIDIA and AMD developing their own. Group 42, an UAE-based AI firm with Microsoft as an investor, accounted for 83% of the company's revenue last year. In May, G42 announced a commitment to purchase $1.43 billion in orders from Cerebras before March 2025, according to a filing.

Cerebras also mentions AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Google as competitors, along with internally developed custom application-specific integrated circuits and various private companies.

In the first six months of 2024, Cerebras reported a net loss of $66.6 million on $136.4 million in sales. In 2023, the company had a net loss of $127 million on revenue of $78.7 million, which was a 14% decrease from the net loss of $77.8 million in the first half of 2023. Revenue in the second quarter of 2024 was $69.8 million, an increase from $5.7 million in the same quarter the previous year.

In 2016, Cerebras was established in Sunnyvale, California, and its co-founder and CEO, Andrew Feldman, previously sold SeaMicro, a server startup he co-founded, for $355 million in 2012.

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

In 2024, the technology IPO market was relatively scarce due to higher interest rates, which led investors to seek out profitable assets. However, there were notable exceptions, such as the social media app Reddit's public listing on the New York Stock Exchange in March and data management software maker Rubrik's IPO in April. Recently, the Federal Reserve announced its first rate cut since 2020, resulting in gains in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index.

Neither Goldman Sachs nor Morgan Stanley are part of the deal. Instead, Citigroup and Barclays are the leading banks involved in the offering.

According to the filing, the largest investor in Cerebras is venture firm Foundation Capital, with Benchmark and Eclipse Ventures also owning significant stakes. Additionally, Alpha Wave, Coatue, and Altimeter each own at least 5%, and the only individual owning 5% or more is CEO Feldman.

Cerebras CEO claims that their inference offering is 20 times quicker than Nvidia's and significantly cheaper.