Artificial Intelligence · Profile from AI Research Companion
Cerebras Systems
The Silicon Valley chipmaker that refused to cut the wafer: instead of dicing a 300mm silicon wafer into hundreds of small chips, Cerebras makes the whole wafer one processor, the Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), with ~900,000 cores and 44GB of on-chip memory in its third generation (company, March 2024). For most of its life it was a niche supplier of supercomputers to national labs and drug companies, and then, from 2023, a company that depended almost entirely on one Abu Dhabi customer, G42, which supplied 87% of its revenue in the first half of 2024 (S-1). That concentration, and a US national-security review of G42's stake, stalled its first IPO filing (September 2024) until it withdrew it (October 2025). A pivot to selling fast inference as a cloud service, a reported >$10bn compute agreement with OpenAI (January 2026; >$20bn in the later prospectus), and a $1bn Series H at ~$23bn (February 2026) set up a second attempt: Cerebras listed on Nasdaq as CBRS on May 14, 2026, raising ~$5.55bn at $185 a share, the largest US IPO of 2026 to that date (reported), and closed its first day at $311, a ~$66bn market value (reported).
At a glance
- Founded
- 2016 (Los Altos, California); emerged from stealth in August 2019 with WSE-1
- Founders
- Andrew Feldman (CEO), Gary Lauterbach, Sean Lie (CTO), Michael James and Jean-Philippe Fricker; most had built SeaMicro, the low-power server maker sold to AMD in 2012 for ~$334m (reported)
- Headquarters
- Sunnyvale, California; offices in San Diego, Toronto and Bangalore (verify); data centres in the US, Canada and Europe (company)
- Ownership / structure
- Public since May 2026 (Nasdaq: CBRS), dual-class shares; G42 holds non-voting shares after a 2025 restructuring; OpenAI and Amazon hold warrants over non-voting Class N shares (prospectus, April 2026, reported). Pre-IPO investors included Benchmark, Foundation Capital, Eclipse, Alpha Wave, Altimeter, Coatue, Fidelity, Atreides, Tiger Global, Valor, 1789 Capital and AMD (reported)
- Leadership (2026)
- Andrew Feldman (co-founder, CEO); Sean Lie (co-founder, CTO); CFO and board composition per prospectus (verify names)
- Products
- WSE-3 chip (TSMC 5nm, ~4tn transistors, March 2024); CS-3 system; Cerebras Inference (cloud API, launched August 2024); on-premises supercomputers; Condor Galaxy systems built and run for G42; model-training and fine-tuning services
- Scale
- Revenue ~$78.7m (2023), ~$290m (2024, derived from reported 76% growth; verify), ~$510m (2025) (filings, reported). Q1 2026 GAAP revenue $193.4m; Q2 2026 $180.1m; full-year 2026 core revenue guidance $880–890m (August 12, 2026, company). Backlog (remaining performance obligations) ~$25.4bn at June 30, 2026, ~22% expected within 24 months (10-Q, reported)
- Profit
- GAAP net loss $481.6m (2024); GAAP net income $237.8m (2025), driven by a ~$363m non-cash gain on a G42-related forward contract; non-GAAP net loss $75.7m (2025) (S-1, reported). Q2 2026 operating loss ~$477m including ~$377m of share-based pay, much of it RSUs vesting at listing (10-Q, reported)
- Customer concentration
- G42 87% of H1 2024 revenue; in 2025 MBZUAI (an Abu Dhabi university) 62% and G42 24%; Q1 2026 G42 plus MBZUAI ~74%, OpenAI ~9% (filings, reported)
- Signature moves (incl. failures)
- Founding and the wafer-scale bet (2016); WSE-1 and the CS systems (2019–21); Condor Galaxy and the G42 partnership (2023); IPO filing and G42 concentration (2024); inference cloud pivot (2024–25); IPO withdrawal and Series G (2025); OpenAI compute agreement (2025–26); Nasdaq IPO (2026)
8 strategic moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2016
Founding and the Wafer Scale Bet
Founding
2019
WSE 1 and the CS Systems
Launch
2023
Condor Galaxy and the G42 Partnership
Partnership / compute deal
2024
IPO Filing and G42 Concentration
IPO (stalled) / regulatory action
2024
Inference Cloud Pivot
Pivot / launch
2025
IPO Withdrawal and Series G
Funding round / IPO withdrawal
2026
Nasdaq IPO
IPO
2026
OpenAI Compute Agreement
Compute deal