"Competitor of Nvidia" Cerebras to go public? CEO says "hope" to conduct an IPO in the US stock market this year

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman stated that he hopes the company will go public in 2025, as the chip manufacturer has received approval from the U.S. government to sell shares to an entity in the UAE. When asked if an IPO is possible this year, Feldman said, "That is our wish."

Cerebras, which produces processors for artificial intelligence workloads, submitted its IPO application in September but has not provided any updates on the scale or timing of the listing. In March of this year, the company announced that it had received approval from a U.S. committee to sell shares to Group 42, an AI company in the UAE supported by Microsoft (MSFT.US). The approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) marks a key step in Cerebras's efforts to go public. Cerebras's competitor is NVIDIA (NVDA.US), whose GPUs are the preferred choice in the industry for training and running AI models. In the first half of 2024, over 85% of Cerebras's revenue came from Group 42.

Since early 2022, the IPO market for tech stocks has generally been in a drought, as rising inflation and interest rates forced investors to withdraw from risk assets. After submitting its application, Cerebras seemed poised to become the first notable pure AI IPO, but then delays occurred.

Previously, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave (CRWV.US) went public in March of this year, and its market value has increased by about 65% since the IPO. The IPO market is showing signs of recovery, with trading application eToro (ETOR.US) listing on Nasdaq this week, and digital healthcare provider Hinge Health planning to go public next week.

The Middle East is becoming an increasingly important market for AI development. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang participated in the Saudi-U.S. Summit Investment Forum this week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, alongside other tech leaders and former President Trump. NVIDIA announced at the conference that it would sell over 18,000 of its latest AI chips to Saudi company Humain.

Reports indicate that Group 42 is also preparing to purchase 100,000 GPUs annually as part of a larger agreement between the U.S. and the UAE. Feldman stated during a roundtable with reporters, "It's important to be part of a big company," and added that regarding the latest announcement, "You only know half of it. I can't share the other half."

In addition to Microsoft, Cerebras also sells products to Meta (META.US) and IBM (IBM.US). Feldman mentioned last year that the company would have another "hyperscale" customer in the first half of 2025. He stated on Thursday, "We are close to reaching another agreement. I think they haven't responded as quickly as possible."

Earlier that day, Cerebras announced that it could run Alibaba's (BABA.US) open-source model on its chips at a lower cost than OpenAI's GPT-4.1 model and at a faster speed