Toronto , Canada – 20 June 2024; Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, speaks on the Collision conference in Toronto on June 20, 2024.
Ramsey Cardy | Sportsfile | Collision | Getty Images
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 within the United Arab Emirates.
“That is our aspiration,” Feldman told reporters on Thursday at the corporate’s Supernova conference in San Francisco, after being asked if an IPO was likely this yr.
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 corporate said it had obtained clearance from a U.S. committee to sell shares to Group 42, a Microsoft-backed AI company based within the UAE.
That clearance got here from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the USA, 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 selection for training and running AI models. Greater than 85% of Cerebras’ revenue in the primary half of 2024 got here from Group 42.
The tech IPO market broadly has been in a drought since early 2022, when rising inflation and better rates of interest pushed investors out of dangerous assets. Cerebras appeared poised to be the primary notable pure-play AI IPO after its filing, but then the got here 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 exit next week.
The Middle East is becoming a more critical marketplace for AI development.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia this week together with other tech leaders and President Donald Trump for the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum. Nvidia said on the event that it will sell greater than 18,000 of its latest AI chips to Saudi company Humain.
Group 42 can be reportedly on tap to buy 100,000 GPUs a yr as a part of an even bigger agreement between the U.S. and UAE.
Feldman said on the roundtable with reporters that it’s “essential to be amongst the massive dogs” and said, regarding the most recent announcements, “You have got half the story. I can not share the opposite half.”
Along with Microsoft, Cerebras sells to Meta and IBM. Feldman said last yr that the corporate would have one other “hyperscaler” throughout the first half of 2025.
“We’re close with one other,” he said on Thursday. “I feel they have not been the quickest to reply.”
Earlier within the day, Cerebras announced the flexibility to run an open-source model from Alibaba on its chips at what it says is a lower cost than what OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 model charges, and at the next speed.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
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