Cerebras is expected to make its public debut later this week after filing paperwork on Monday that raised the size of its initial public offering to 30 million shares and set a goal of raising up to $4.8 billion.
The listing is likely to be the biggest IPO of 2026 so far, a milestone that comes as the chipmaker’s business is increasingly tied to OpenAI. Cerebras counts Amazon and OpenAI among its customers, and it has a deal with OpenAI under which it will provide 750 megawatts of computing power for three years.
That arrangement goes beyond a standard supplier relationship. Cerebras is also handing OpenAI warrants that could give the startup a 10th of the company’s shares over time. At a share price of $155 at the midpoint of the IPO range, those warrants would be worth about $5 billion, a figure that shows how closely the two companies are now linked.
The timing adds another layer. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stand on Tuesday in the Musk versus OpenAI trial, and the case continued in its second week on Wednesday as Cerebras moved closer to a market debut. The overlap puts one of the most watched AI companies and one of its key hardware backers in the same news cycle, even if for very different reasons.
Cerebras’s IPO also looks different from the one planned 18 months earlier because of its relationship with OpenAI. The company and OpenAI had a similar type of deal in October 2024, and OpenAI has used comparable arrangements before, including a deal with AMD last October and an earlier alliance with Nvidia. That pattern helps explain why Cerebras’s offering is drawing unusual attention: it is not just a public listing, but a test of how deeply the AI boom has already fused chip supply, computing capacity and customer ownership.
For now, the question is less whether Cerebras can attract interest — the size of the raise and the customer list suggest it can — than how investors will value a company whose future is so closely bound to the spending needs of OpenAI. The answer will start to emerge as the shares hit the market later this week.
