Cerebras Systems is preparing for a new IPO in the United States. The AI chipmaker plans to file its application with the SEC next week, with its sights set on a stock market listing in the second quarter of 2026.
The news was reported on first by Reuters. The company withdrew its previous IPO in October, a few days after raising more than $1 billion at a valuation of $8 billion. This was already the second delay: Cerebras submitted paperwork to the US stock market regulator in 2024, but postponed it after a national security investigation.
Geopolitical complications
The earlier delay was related to an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). It focused on the minority stake held by G42, a tech conglomerate from the United Arab Emirates. US authorities feared that companies from the Middle East could give China access to advanced US AI technology.
Sources report that G42 is no longer listed as an investor in the new application. The reason for this is unknown. Cerebras announced earlier this year that it had received approval from CFIUS.
Wafer-scale technology against Nvidia
Cerebras is known for its wafer-scale engines, chips designed to accelerate the training and inferencing of large AI models. The company competes directly with Nvidia and other AI chipmakers. Currently, Nvidia has a huge lead in terms of adoption, with the added advantage that it now has the deepest pockets in the industry thanks to billions of dollars in quarterly revenue. Only Google could operate independently of Nvidia’s GPUs from one day to the next without any major problems thanks to its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
Companies such as Cerebras and Groq hope to achieve efficiency and/or AI performance that challenges Nvidia through a completely different architecture. Cerebras, in particular, claims to be more efficient, cheaper, and 21 times faster than Nvidia’s fastest GPU system, DGX Blackwell. Llama 4 Maverick ran 2.5 times faster on another benchmark, so the results are highly variable. An IPO would show how much such claims impress investors.