OpenAI’s cozy partner Cerebras is on track for a blockbuster IPO

The finish line is finally in sight in the long-running saga of Cerebras Systems’ IPO. The AI ​​chip maker said Monday that it is preparing to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 per share. This would raise $3.5 billion and give it a market cap of $26.6 billion at the top end.

That would be a nice boost in a few months for the deceased investors who bought into the $1 billion Series H in February at a $23 billion valuation. It would also be a boon for OpenAI and some of its executives.

Should Cerebras do an IPO at or above the high end, it will be the largest technology IPO of 2026 to date. It could also prove the appetite for even bigger blockbuster offerings waiting in the wings, like SpaceX and possibly OpenAI and Anthropic.

Cerebras offers an AI-specific chip called the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 that challenges GPU-based AI chips. Cerebras says its chip is faster for inference and consumes less power than such competitors. Inference is the computing power required to process user prompts.

A long list of top investors benefits from a healthy IPO. Alpha Wave by Rick Gerson; Benchmark (via partner Eric Vishria); Lior Susan’s eclipse; Fidelity; and Foundation Capital (through partner Steve Vassallo) are according to them the largest shareholders with a stake of more than 5% to the company’s SEC filing.

The company says its list of investors also includes 1789 Capital, Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Abu Dhabi’s G42, Altimeter, AMD, Atreides Management, Coatue, Moore Strategic Ventures, Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners and VY Capital.

Plus, Cerebras names his website also a long list of angel investors. These include OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI founder and president Greg Brockman, former OpenAI chief scientist (now founder of his own AI startup) Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI board member and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Sun Microsystems and Arista co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, and several other tech luminaries.

Although Sam Altman’s stake was not large enough to be disclosed in the SEC filings, he was quoted in the S-1. That’s because Cerebras’ relationship with OpenAI is even more remarkable than that of its angel investors.

This relationship was even presented as evidence by Elon Musk in his lawsuit with OpenAI. OpenAI had at one point considered acquiring Cerebras, according to legal documents from Musk’s lawyers who claim he was unaware of all of OpenAI executives’ personal investments in the company.

That deal never materialized, but OpenAI became one of Cerebras’ largest customers. In December, OpenAI even loaned Cerebras $1 billion, backed by warrants that allowed OpenAI to buy more than 33 million shares, the S-1 disclosed. So while OpenAI isn’t a major shareholder now, it could become one.

Cerebras had hoped to go public in 2024, but was postponed due to a federal review of an investment from Abu Dhabi-based cloud provider G42, which was (and still is, the chip company says) a major customer. That IPO attempt was ultimately shelved.

A year later, Cerebras tried to raise more money. In September, it lifted $1.1 billion at a post-money valuation of $8.1 billion led by Fidelity and Atreides. A few months later, Cerebras signed its new multi-year deal worth more than $10 billion with OpenAI, which included the loan and warrants. In February, it raised its $1 billion Series H round, its latest mega round.

Should investors eat up the IPO, OpenAI and its executives stand to gain in more ways than one.

That seems likely. Banks have already received $10 billion in orders for the $3.5 billion in shares on offer. Bloomberg reports. That kind of demand indicates that the company is likely to price its stock even higher than this announced range, making even more money for itself and more value for its investors.