Cerebras files for a US IPO again: the AI chip developer returns to the market

Cerebras Systems is heading back to the public market. The AI chip developer and data center operator has filed a new US IPO application just a few months after withdrawing its previous one. This is not just another startup offering riding the wave of interest in artificial intelligence. It is a rare attempt to take a major AI infrastructure player public, one that sells not models but computing power, server systems and cloud access to them. According to the new filing, the company plans to offer Class A shares on Nasdaq under the ticker CBRS.

Cerebras builds its business around its own AI accelerator architecture, server systems and related software. In its filings, the company stresses that it now earns money not only by supplying hardware to customers' data centers but also through a cloud consumption model, in which customers rent compute by the month or year, or pay for usage by token volume. For a business long seen as a niche alternative to Nvidia, this is an important shift: Cerebras sells not just a chip but an entire AI infrastructure stack.

The financial trajectory looks impressive. Cerebras revenue grew from $24.6 million in 2022 to $78.7 million in 2023, then to $290.3 million in 2024, and reached $510 million in 2025. Annual growth in the latest reporting period was 76%. On a GAAP basis, the company reported net income of $237.8 million, against a loss of $481.6 million a year earlier. But the picture is less straightforward: the same documents state that Cerebras remained unprofitable on a non-GAAP basis, and part of the accounting profit stems from the revaluation of liabilities. In other words, the IPO story rests primarily on accelerating growth and scaling demand, not on proven, sustainable profitability.

New contracts are another key argument for the offering. In January 2026, Cerebras announced a multiyear agreement with OpenAI worth more than $20 billion. It covers the deployment of 750 megawatts of high-speed AI compute, as well as joint work on future models for the next generation of Cerebras' hardware platform. In March, the company also announced a partnership with AWS that is meant to expand global distribution of its infrastructure for inference workloads. At the end of 2025, remaining performance obligations under contracts reached $24.6 billion, with a significant share of that tied to the OpenAI agreements.

The prospectus also lists the risks plainly. Cerebras still depends heavily on a limited number of large customers. G42 accounted for 24% of the company's revenue in 2025 and 85% in 2024, while Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, or MBZUAI, contributed another 62% of revenue in 2025. In other words, even amid rapid growth, the revenue mix remains concentrated. This matters all the more because the previous IPO attempt dragged on amid scrutiny of Cerebras' relationship with G42 by US regulators, after which the company withdrew its earlier documents in October 2025. The new filing means the company is returning to its listing plan in a revised configuration.

What does this mean?

If the IPO happens, investors will get one of the few pure public bets on the AI infrastructure layer outside the familiar market giants. But they will not be buying a calm, mature business. They will be buying a company in an aggressive growth phase, with a huge order backlog, high capital intensity and dependence on a handful of partners. For Cerebras, this is a chance to turn the AI hype into long-term capital. For the market, it is a test of whether it is ready to fund not only the model builders but also those building the computing foundation for the next stage of AI competition.