With Its IPO Done, Cerebras Can Get Back To Pushing The AI Envelope
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With Its IPO Done, Cerebras Can Get Back To Pushing The AI Envelope
Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett<br>Morgan
Co-Editor, Co-Founder, The Next Platform
Published<br>fri 15 May 2026 // 15:40 UTC
There<br>will probably never be a better time for any AI-related company to go public<br>than between right now and next summer. The GenAI frenzy is at a fever pitch, and<br>the big four hyperscalers and cloud builders alone – Amazon Web Services,<br>Google Cloud, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft Azure – have collectively projected<br>for capital expenses to be somewhere between $695 billion and $725 billion in<br>2026. There is probably at least that much expected to be spent between the big<br>AI model builders (who are starting to build their own datacenters), hyperscalers<br>in China, plus sovereign AI centers, HPC centers, academic centers, and<br>governments who are also wanting to get in on the GenAI action.<br>GenAI<br>is a tactical and strategic weapon, both economically and militarily, and it is<br>also a cultural force that has the potential to do great things as well as<br>great harm to the established orders in these spheres.
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Set<br>against this backdrop, the hyperscalers and cloud builders are designing their<br>own CPUs and XPUs or partnering with companies other than Nvidia and AMD to try<br>to get better bang for the buck for AI inference workloads – or just to get any<br>kind of matrix math compute at all.<br>It<br>would have been hard for Cerebras Systems to pick a better day to go public and<br>set the tone for the initial public offerings of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX,<br>the latter of which has absorbed the xAI model building business that probably<br>won’t be building Grok models in the future but is selling capacity on the<br>Colossus-1 supercomputer in Memphis to rival Anthropic.<br>It<br>is a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” scenario, with no love lost<br>between OpenAI and Musk, one of its founding investors who correctly observes<br>that OpenAI was founded as a non-profit but then changed its mind. In the long<br>run, SpaceX will probably build foundation models, or maybe Tesla will. Elon<br>Musk is probably not done moving his pieces around the board, and it would not<br>be surprising to see SpaceX and Tesla merged into one giant conglomerate doing self-driving<br>cars, autonomous robots, and space launches, all of which need physical AI<br>models more than they need GenAI models. If the Musk conglomerate needs a GenAI<br>model, it can just use Anthropic’s Claude and be done with it, trading compute capacity<br>for model access much as Microsoft did for many years with OpenAI.<br>The<br>appetite for shares in Cerebras Systems, whose bankers sure did take their time<br>getting co-founder and chief executive officer Andrew Feldman to ring the bell<br>at the NASDAQ market, was huge, with an oversubscription of 25X for the 215.23<br>million shares that floated at $185 a pop, raising $5.55 billion for Cerebras.<br>At the end of the day, the Cerebras shares were worth $311 per share, giving<br>the public float of shares a market capitalization of $39.8 billion. If all of<br>the shares and warrants in the company were taken into account, the market<br>capitalization is about $95 billion.
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That’s<br>not too shabby for a company that had a $23 billion valuation after a $1<br>billion Series H fund raising round back in February.<br>With<br>the IPO, Feldman’s 4.5 percent stake in Cerebras is worth $3.2 billion, while<br>chief technology officer Sean Li has a 2.4 percent stake worth $1.7 billion.<br>We<br>are not going to recap all of the financials for Cerebras, which we<br>drilled down into back in April when the company refiled an S-1 in preparation<br>for going public, something it had planned to do last year but put the<br>kibosh on it because it was able to raise money through addition funding<br>rounds. All told, including $1 billion from the Series H round, $1.3 billion in<br>cash and marketable securities, and $1 billion in working capital from its<br>$20 billion, 750 megawatt deal to install CS waferscale systems at OpenAI between<br>now 2028 plus another 3 gigawatts of gear in 2029 and 2030. With the $5.55<br>billion infusion from the IPO, it has $8.9 billion in cash and equivalents.<br>That is a good bit of money with which to build those systems for OpenAI as<br>well as Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and G42, the<br>two other big customers from the Middle East. The deal with Amazon Web Services<br>has yet to be fully fleshed out, but we think it will happen and there is an<br>outside chance that CS systems become the low latency inference boxes at AWS to<br>complement its homegrown Trainium systems. It would not be surprising to see<br>Anthropic ink a deal with Cerebras, too – and soon before Anthropic goes public<br>so it can show it has the iron it needs to do low latency AI inference.<br>Here<br>is what is very important about that big pile of cash that Cerebras now has. It<br>is the successful...