In 2024, Cerebras tried to go public and pulled the plug.
Two years later, the AI chipmaker is back. This time it has real revenue and a much bigger pitch.
Cerebras (CBRS %) said in a new prospectus filed Monday that it plans to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 each, raising up to $3.5 billion on the Nasdaq.
The high end of the range puts the company's value at about $26.6 billion. That is a step up from the $23 billion private valuation it carried in an early-2026 funding round.
Cerebras builds wafer-scale chips, which are huge single-piece processors meant to train and run AI models faster than the smaller graphics chips most companies use today.
The pitch is simple. AI computing spending is huge and still growing, and most of that money flows through one company: Nvidia.
When Cerebras tried to go public in 2024, it was mostly a hardware company selling chips to a few customers. The business model was a question mark.
The new filing shows a different company. Fourth-quarter sales jumped about 76% from a year ago to $510 million, and net income for the quarter was $87.9 million.
The big driver was a January deal to provide up to 750 megawatts of AI computing power to OpenAI through 2028, valued at over $20 billion.
That single contract turns Cerebras into something closer to a cloud provider for AI. It is a model that can grow without selling more units one at a time.
The IPO is the first big test of public market appetite for an AI chip company outside of Nvidia.
Several recent tech listings have traded below their offer prices in the first few weeks, even with strong demand for AI exposure. That has made bankers more careful about how they price big AI deals.
If Cerebras prices at the top of the range, it sets a benchmark for every other AI hardware company waiting in line. If it prices lower, the market is sending a message about how much investors are willing to pay for an Nvidia rival.
CEO Andrew Feldman is not selling any of his shares in the offering. At the top of the range, his stake would be worth about $1.28 billion.
That signal matters. Founders who hold their stock through an IPO usually believe the price is going up, not down.
Nvidia's market share in AI chips is still over 90%, with most major cloud providers and AI labs locked into its software ecosystem.
Cerebras does not need to beat Nvidia to win. It just needs to take a slice of demand from buyers who want a faster option for very large AI models.
The IPO timing is also useful for the company. AI infrastructure spending across big tech is at all-time highs, and capital is flowing into the sector at a record pace.
If the deal lands well, expect more AI hardware names to follow. If it stumbles, the IPO window for the rest of the sector closes fast.