Cerebras Systems, the Sunnyvale-based AI chip startup known for building chips the size of a dinner plate, has refiled for a public listing on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CBRS, targeting a mid-May 2026 debut. The move comes roughly 18 months after the company first attempted to go public, only to see that process derailed by a US national security review of its financial ties to Abu Dhabi-based technology conglomerate G42. With that regulatory hurdle now cleared, Cerebras is returning to public markets with improved financials, a landmark deal with OpenAI, and a valuation that reportedly sits around $23 billion following a $1 billion Series H funding round completed in February.
The numbers in the new filing tell a substantially different story from 2024. Cerebras posted revenue of $510 million for 2025, a 76 percent increase from $290 million the prior year, and swung to a net income of $87.9 million compared to a net loss of nearly $485 million in 2024. The company also disclosed $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations as of December 31, 2025, with 15 percent of that amount expected to be recognized across 2026 and 2027. The headline figure, however, carries an asterisk. On a non-GAAP basis, stripping out a one-time gain from the restructuring of the G42 investment, Cerebras still posted an operating loss of $75.7 million, wider than the year before. The profitability story is real, but partly shaped by accounting adjustments tied to its complex UAE investor history.
The technology itself is genuinely distinctive. Where Nvidia and AMD cut a silicon wafer into hundreds of individual chips, Cerebras keeps the entire 12-inch wafer intact as a single processor. Its flagship WSE-3 chip contains 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI-optimized cores, making it physically and computationally far larger than a standard GPU. The company argues this architecture eliminates the data transfer bottlenecks that slow down GPU clusters, particularly for inference workloads where response speed matters. CEO Andrew Feldman has been direct about the competitive implications, telling the Wall Street Journal that Cerebras had taken the fast inference business at OpenAI away from Nvidia. OpenAI signed a deal with Cerebras in January 2026 for up to 750 megawatts of computing capacity through 2028, a contract valued at over $20 billion, and also extended a $1 billion loan to Cerebras to help fund data center buildout. Amazon Web Services followed with its own agreement in March, purchasing roughly $270 million in Cerebras shares and planning to offer Cerebras-powered inference services in the second half of 2026.
