Report: AI chipmaker Cerebras to increase IPO price target amid surging investor demand

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc. is expected to increase the size and price of its initial public offering later today as investor demand for access to its shares continues to rise.

Reuters reported today that the chipmaker is now considering raising its IPO price range to between $150 to $160 per share, up from an initial target of between $115 and $125 per share. The company is also considering increasing the number of marketed shares from 28 million to 30 million, anonymous sources told the news agency. The new price range means that Cerebras can expect to raise about $4.8 billion from the sale, up from an earlier target of $3.5 billion under the original terms of the IPO, which were detailed last week.

Cerebras has timed its IPO to take advantage of the surging demand for high-performance AI chips, and has reportedly received orders for more than 20 times the number of shares it made available for the sale, according to the sources. The company is set to officially price its IPO on May 13.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company sells wafer-sized AI chips called the WSE-3 that are several times larger than Nvidia Corp.’s Blackwell B200 graphics processing units. One of its main selling points of its chips is their 44-gigabyte pool of SRAM. SRAM is a memory variety that features significantly more transistors per square millimeter than standard server DRAM. As a result, it’s considerably faster and several orders of magnitude more expensive.

Processors include a quartz crystal that moves millions of times per second in response to an electric current. Each movement corresponds to a clock cycle, the basic unit of time in chips. Cerebras says WSE-3’s 900,000 cores can access the onboard SRAM pool with latency of one clock cycle, which is significantly faster than what a standard graphics card offers.

The result is faster performance on inference, the process of providing responses to queries. Cerebras ships the WSE-3 as part of a 1.8-ton appliance called the CS-3. Customers can link together multiple CS-3 systems into clusters with the help of auxiliary devices it also sells.

When it filed its IPO paperwork last week, Cerebras revealed that its revenue had jumped by 76% in 2025 to $290.3 million. It’s already profitable, having recorded a net income of $87.9 million that year, having lost $485 million in the year prior.

The company has benefited from increased demand for its processors as AI labs shift from training AI models to deploying them in production. That suits Cerebras, whose chips are better suited for inference workloads, running the computations that enable AI models to respond to user queries, than Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs.

This week’s IPO is the chipmaker’s second attempt to go public. It originally attempted to do so back in 2024, only to cancel the plan last year due to controversy over its partnership with the United Arab Emirates-based firm G42, which accounted for more than 80% of its revenue that year. The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States subjected that partnership to a national security review, but ultimately cleared both firms of any wrongdoing.

While that process was ongoing, Cerebras took care to continue building its business, adding OpenAI Group PBC and Amazon Web Services Inc., two of the world’s biggest builders of AI infrastructure, as customers.

Cerebras’ IPO will be the biggest listing so far this year, according to Dealogic. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS Group AG are all helping the company with its offering. Once the listing concludes, Cerebras’ stock will be traded on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “CBRS.”

Photo: Cerebras