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Cerebras Systems just lit the fuse on what could be the biggest tech IPO of 2026.
OpenAI-backed wafer-scale chipmaker wants to raise $3.5 billion and walk into public markets with a price tag that could hit $26.6 billion.
Here’s what’s happening. On Monday, May 4, Cerebras filed an updated prospectus with the SEC, laying out the actual numbers. The company plans to sell 28 million shares in a price band of $115 to $125 each, and at the high end, that puts its market cap at $26.6 billion.
The IPO is expected to price on May 13 and start trading the next day on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker CBRS. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS are leading the deal.
If you’re wondering whether investors are interested, the answer is a loud yes. According to Bloomberg, banks are already fielding $10 billion worth of orders for the $3.5 billion of shares on offer. That’s roughly three times oversubscribed before the roadshow has even wrapped up. Demand like that usually means the final price lands at or above the top of the range.
So what makes Cerebras worth all this attention?
In a word: the chip. While Nvidia and pretty much everyone else cut a silicon wafer into hundreds of small chips, Cerebras keeps the wafer whole and turns the entire thing into one giant processor. It’s called the Wafer-Scale Engine, and it’s 58 times larger than Nvidia’s B200 AI chip, with 900,000 compute cores packed onto a single piece of silicon.
Bigger isn’t just a flex here. The reason chips talk to each other slowly is because data has to travel across boards and racks. Put it all on one slab of silicon and that latency mostly disappears.
That pitch has landed some big customers. Cerebras has a multi-year contract with OpenAI, announced in December 2025, valued at over $20 billion, where OpenAI agreed to absorb 750 megawatts of Cerebras compute through 2028. OpenAI also handed Cerebras a $1 billion working capital loan.
In 2016, @sama and I first met. @OpenAI was a vision. @CerebrasSystems was powerpoint. Sam and the OpenAi founders became one of the early investors in @CerebrasSystems.
In the following years, the Cerebras and OpenAI frequently met to explore working together. But the timing…
— Andrew Feldman (@andrewdfeldman) August 5, 2025
In March 2026, Amazon Web Services signed a binding term sheet to become the first hyperscaler to deploy Cerebras systems in its own data centers. Meta also runs inference on its Llama 4 model using Cerebras hardware. That’s a who’s who of AI customers throwing real money at a non-NVIDIA option.
The financials are interesting too, and that matters because most AI hardware startups are still bleeding cash. Cerebras’ fourth-quarter revenue grew about 76% year over year to $510 million, with $87.9 million in net income for the period. It means the company is growing fast and actually making money, a combination that’s been rare in this space.
There’s also a backlog story that explains some of the valuation. The remaining performance obligation, basically signed-but-not-yet-recognized revenue, sits at roughly $25 billion. Most of that flows through the books in 2028 and 2029, which lines up neatly with the OpenAI buildout.
Now, the part that makes this less than a slam dunk. Two customers account for 86% of Cerebras’ revenue last year, which is a heavy concentration risk. If OpenAI or AWS slows down or shifts strategy, the impact lands fast. There’s also the share structure to be aware of. Class A shares sold to the public carry one vote each, while Class B shares held by insiders and early investors carry 20 votes each, meaning the public gets the upside but very little say in how the company runs. That’s increasingly common in tech IPOs, but worth knowing going in.
The CEO is keeping his skin in the game. Co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman is not selling any of his personal shares in the offering, and his 10.3 million shares would be worth up to $1.28 billion at the top of the price range. That’s usually a good signal.
This is also Cerebras’ second swing at going public. An earlier attempt in 2024 was abandoned mid-process as the company pivoted its strategy away from direct chip sales and toward running its own cloud infrastructure. A federal review of an investment from Abu Dhabi-based G42 also held things up. That issue has since been resolved, and G42 is no longer listed as a partner or investor.
The bigger picture matters here. If Cerebras prices at the high end, this becomes the largest tech IPO of 2026 so far, and it could prove the appetite for even bigger offerings waiting in the wings, including SpaceX and possibly OpenAI and Anthropic.
NVIDIA still owns this market and has the deepest software ecosystem in AI. Nobody is realistically replacing it anytime soon. But the AI infrastructure spend is now large enough that a credible second-place player can build a serious business in the gaps. Cerebras is making the case that those gaps are wide enough to fund a public company.
We’ll know how the market feels next Wednesday night when the deal prices are announced. Given the order book, betting against a strong debut looks like a tough call.
