Cerebras CEO says chipmaker's 'aspiration' is to hold IPO in 2025

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said his hope is to take his company public in 2025 now that the chipmaker has obtained clearance from the U.S. government to sell shares to an entity in the United Arab Emirates.

"That's our aspiration," Feldman told reporters on Thursday at the company's Supernova conference in San Francisco, after being asked if an IPO was likely this year.

Cerebras, which makes processors for artificial intelligence workloads, filed to go public in September but hasn't provided an update on the expected size or timing of an offering. In March, the company said it had obtained clearance from a U.S. committee to sell shares to Group 42, a Microsoft-backed AI company based in the UAE.

That clearance came from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, and marked a key step for Cerebras in its effort to go public. Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are the industry's choice for training and running AI models. More than 85% of Cerebras' revenue in the first half of 2024 came from Group 42.

The tech IPO market broadly has been in a drought since early 2022, when rising inflation and higher interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. Cerebras appeared poised to be the first notable pure-play AI IPO after its filing, but then the came the delay. CoreWeave, which provides AI infrastructure, debuted in March and has seen its market value jump about 65% since its IPO.

The IPO market is showing signs of life, with trading app eToro hitting the Nasdaq this week and digital health provider Hinge Health scheduled to go out next week.

The Middle East is becoming a more critical market for AI development.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia this week along with other tech leaders and President Donald Trump for the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum. Nvidia said at the event that it will sell more than 18,000 of its latest AI chips to Saudi company Humain.

Group 42 is also reportedly on tap to purchase 100,000 GPUs a year as part of a bigger agreement between the U.S. and UAE.

Feldman said at the roundtable with reporters that it's "important to be among the big dogs" and said, regarding the latest announcements, "You've got half the story. I can't share the other half."

In addition to Microsoft, Cerebras sells to Meta and IBM. Feldman said last year that the company would have another "hyperscaler" within the first half of 2025.

"We're close with another," he said on Thursday. "I think they haven't been the quickest to respond."

Earlier in the day, Cerebras announced the ability to run an open-source model from Alibaba on its chips at what it says is a lower price than what OpenAI's GPT-4.1 model charges, and at a higher speed.

— CNBC's Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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