AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO to take on Nvidia

Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Monday filed its prospectus for an initial public offering, with plans to trade under the ticker symbol "CBRS" on the Nasdaq.

Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are the industry's choice for training and running AI models. Cerebras says on its website that its WSE-3 chip comes with more cores and memory than Nvidia's popular H100. It's also a physically larger chip. In addition to selling chips, Cerebras offers cloud-based services that rely on its own computing clusters.

Cerebras had a net loss of $66.6 million in the first six months of 2024 on $136.4 million in sales, according to the filing. For the fist six months of 2023, the company had a net loss of $77.8 million and $8.7 million in sales.

For the full year of 2023, Cerebras reported a net loss of $127.2 million on revenue of $78.7 million.

The company reported a net loss of $50.9 million on $69.8 million in revenue in the second quarter, compared with a $26.2 million loss and $5.7 million in revenue in the same period a year earlier.

Operating expenses have increased this year in part because of higher personnel costs to support revenue growth, the company said.

AI chips are a growing and crowded market. Cloud providers Amazon, Google and Microsoft have developed their own AI chips. The company said that Group 42, a UAE-based AI firm that counts Microsoft as an investor, accounted for 83% of Cerebras's revenue last year.

In addition to Nvidia, Cerebras cites AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Google as competitors, "as well as internally developed custom application-specific integrated circuits and a variety of private companies."

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes the Cerebras