Cerebras Files for Nasdaq IPO With $510 Million in 2025 Revenue and a $20 Billion OpenAI Compute Contract in Hand
AI chipmaker Cerebras submitted its S-1 for a CBRS listing on April 17, backed by a $20 billion multi-year OpenAI deal and a swing to profitability, after withdrawing its first IPO attempt over a national security review.
Overview
Cerebras Systems filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on April 17, 2026 for an initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol CBRS, according to the company’s press release. The Sunnyvale-based AI chipmaker returns to public markets after withdrawing its first attempt, disclosing a sharp swing to profitability, rapid revenue growth, and a multi-year inference-compute contract with OpenAI that anchors its commercial story.
What We Know
The filing
Cerebras’ S-1 names Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS Investment Bank as lead book-running managers, with Mizuho, TD Cowen, Needham & Company, Craig-Hallum, Wedbush Securities, Rosenblatt, and Academy Securities as additional underwriters and co-managers, according to TradingView’s reporting on the filing. Share count and price range have not yet been determined, and the company said the offering remains contingent on market conditions, per the company press release. Proceeds are earmarked for working capital, operating expenses, capital expenditures, restricted stock unit tax withholding, and potential acquisitions, as reported by TradingView.
Financials
The S-1 discloses $510 million in 2025 revenue, up 76 percent from $290.3 million in 2024, according to SiliconANGLE. The company swung from a $485 million net loss in 2024 to $87.9 million in net income in 2025, as reported by SiliconANGLE. TradingView’s summary of the filing also lists $199.1 million in gross profit (a 39.0 percent gross margin) and a $145.9 million operating loss for 2025, indicating that non-operating items contributed to the reported net result.
The OpenAI contract
The centerpiece of the filing is a multi-year agreement with OpenAI valued at more than $20 billion to deliver 750 megawatts of inference compute through 2028, with options to add up to 1.25 gigawatts of additional capacity by 2030, according to SiliconANGLE. Under the contract, OpenAI received warrants for 33.4 million Cerebras shares contingent on purchasing 2 gigawatts of capacity, per SiliconANGLE. Cerebras has separately received a $1 billion loan from OpenAI, and Morgan Stanley is providing a $125 million revolving credit facility that expands to $850 million post-IPO, as reported by SiliconANGLE.
The $20 billion commitment more than doubles the $10 billion OpenAI-Cerebras arrangement previously reported by The Machine Herald in connection with the production launch of GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark on Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 3 hardware in February 2026.
AWS and the product stack
Cerebras has a binding term sheet with AWS announced in March 2026 to deploy WSE-3 chips using a disaggregated inference architecture, in which AWS Trainium chips handle prefill operations and Cerebras hardware handles decode operations, according to SiliconANGLE. The company’s flagship CS-3 systems are built around the Wafer Scale Engine 3, which Cerebras describes as 58 times the size of Nvidia’s B200 GPU, containing 4 trillion transistors and offering 27 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth, per SiliconANGLE. Cerebras’ business spans hardware sales, cloud services, support and management services, and custom AI model work across on-premises, cloud, and partner channels, as described in TradingView’s reporting.
The second attempt
This is Cerebras’ second run at a public listing. The company filed an earlier S-1 in September 2024 and withdrew the registration in October 2025, according to SiliconANGLE. CNBC’s coverage of the new filing notes that Cerebras scrapped its original IPO plans last year. Yahoo Finance reports that the initial filing was postponed over a U.S. national security review tied to G42, a UAE-based investor, with clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States obtained in 2025. The same Yahoo Finance report frames the refiling as part of a broader wave of AI-related listings.
What We Don’t Know
- The share count, price range, and targeted valuation for the offering have not been disclosed in the filing, according to the company press release.
- The exact trigger conditions, strike price, and vesting schedule of the 33.4 million OpenAI warrants beyond the 2-gigawatt capacity threshold cited by SiliconANGLE are not publicly detailed.
- Operating and cash-flow dynamics behind the reported swing from a $145.9 million operating loss to $87.9 million in net income, as disclosed in TradingView’s filing summary and SiliconANGLE, are not fully explained in the public summaries of the S-1.
- A listing date has not been set; the offering is subject to market conditions, per the company press release.
Context
The filing lands in a market where AI infrastructure deals and venture rounds have concentrated in a small number of frontier labs and chip suppliers. For Cerebras, the S-1 positions the company as an inference-focused alternative to Nvidia, with a single customer, OpenAI, underwriting a large share of its forward revenue via the multi-year capacity contract reported by SiliconANGLE. The AWS term sheet described by SiliconANGLE and the company’s own IPO filing announcement signal an attempt to broaden beyond that anchor relationship ahead of pricing.