AI Chipmaker Cerebras Taps Morgan Stanley for IPO
AI chip company Cerebras has tapped Morgan Stanley to lead its upcoming initial public offering. The move signals the next step for the high-profile Nvidia competitor as it seeks to capitalize on the booming demand for AI hardware.
Founded in 2015, Cerebras’s core innovation is the Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), a family of processors that are the largest chips ever built. The latest iteration, the WSE-3, is the size of a dinner plate and contains 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI-optimized cores. This design integrates memory and processing on a single wafer to reduce communication bottlenecks that can slow down systems using clusters of GPUs. The Sunnyvale-based company has raised approximately $2.9 billion in total funding. A recent Series H funding round in February 2026 brought in $1 billion, pushing the company's valuation to over $23 billion. Notable investors include Tiger Global, Fidelity Investments, Benchmark, and Altimeter. The planned IPO could raise around $2 billion and may launch as early as April. This marks a renewed effort to go public after the company previously withdrew an IPO registration in October 2025. A significant portion of Cerebras's revenue comes from a strategic partnership with G42, an AI holding company based in the United Arab Emirates. Together, they are building a network of nine AI supercomputers called Condor Galaxy. Cerebras also has partnerships with OpenAI and the Mayo Clinic. The company was founded by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie, and Jean-Philippe Fricker, several of whom previously co-founded server company SeaMicro. SeaMicro was acquired by AMD for $334 million in 2012. Cerebras is entering a competitive AI chip market projected to be worth hundreds of billions by the end of the decade. While Nvidia currently dominates the market, companies like Cerebras, along with major tech firms like Google and Amazon, are developing specialized hardware to challenge its position.
