Cerebras prepares to ride AI demand to 2026's biggest IPO to date

Cerebras Systems is planning to raise the price of its shares before listing on the Nasdaq. The new target range is set at $150 to $160 per share. It is up from the earlier range of $115 to $125.

The number of shares it will sell has also increased from 28 million to 30 million. The information wasn’t announced publicly and comes from Reuters sources with knowledge of the matter.

If the share prices are revised with the new range, Cerebras will hit around $4.8 billion. It is a massive jump from the initial $3.5 billion the company was looking to raise. The offering will be priced on May 13 and may have changes in the final numbers.

The sources have also said that the share orders have shot up 20 times the number available. It shows how much appetite there is among investors.

Cerebras’ second attempt at going public

Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, builds specialized processors aimed at running advanced AI models, a space where Nvidia has long held a dominant position.

The company’s chips are built specifically for AI inference, meaning the work a model does when responding to a user’s question, as opposed to the training process. As AI companies move from building models to actually putting them to use, demand for inference chips has grown sharply.

As reported by Cryptopolitan previously, the company filed for an IPO in 2024 but dropped those plans after a national security review was launched into its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI company that accounted for more than 80% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024. The review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States was eventually resolved in the company’s favor.

Since then, Cerebras has added Amazon and OpenAI, two of the biggest names in AI infrastructure, as customers. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS Group are handling the offering. The company will trade under the ticker symbol CBRS.

The listing is expected to be the largest IPO in the world so far this year, according to data from Dealogic.

News of the revised offering pushed Asian chip stocks higher on Monday. South Korea’s KOSPI index closed up nearly 5% at a record high, with SK Hynix climbing 12% and Samsung Electronics gaining 6%.

Startups line up to challenge Nvidia

The timing is ideal for Cerebras as investors are already showing interest and putting money into AI chip startups like never before. Data from Dealroom showed that these small startups raised $8.3 billion globally. By the end of 2026, the investment is expected to hit a new record.

The push is rooted in a belief that Nvidia’s graphics processors, which were originally built for gaming, are not the most efficient tools for running AI at scale. Startups argue that chips designed specifically for AI can deliver meaningful savings in both energy and cost.

“Inference is dominant now, and the existing GPU architecture wasn’t built for it in ways that matter most at scale,” said Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, director at the Nato Innovation Fund, which has backed U.K. AI chip startup Fractile.

Nvidia, for its part, is not standing still. The company spent more than $18 billion on research and development in its most recent financial year, which ended in January 2026, and in December acquired assets from AI inference startup Groq for $20 billion. It also announced a $4 billion investment in two photonics technology companies in March.

Still, startups continue to attract large backing. In the U.S., Cerebras picked up $1 billion in February, while MatX, Ayar Labs, and Etched each raised $500 million rounds in 2026. In Europe, Axelera and Olix have both raised more than $200 million this year.

“It’s no longer a niche bet,” said Carlos Espinal, managing partner at European venture firm Seedcamp, which backed chip startup Vaire Computing. “It’s becoming a core part of how people think about AI infrastructure.”

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