By Robbie Whelan and Elias Schisgall

Cerebras Systems, a chip startup that makes processors customized for running advanced artificial-intelligence models, filed paperwork Friday for an initial public offering.

The company, whose customers include OpenAI and Amazon, didn't say how many shares it would sell or at what price. A spokesperson said the IPO is set for mid-May.

Cerebras, which produces a chip called the Wafer-Scale Engine, had planned to go public last year, but canceled its plans in October, shortly after raising around $1 billion in a new funding round.

In January, the chip designer struck a deal worth upward of $10 billion to supply 750 megawatts of computing power using its processors to OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal reported. Last month, Amazon Web Services signed a deal to use the company's chips for its data centers.

The shift to so-called inference computing is roiling the semiconductor industry, as AI labs rush to find more chips and improve the cost-efficiency of their computing power. Inference refers to the types of computations required to allow an AI model to respond to user queries. It requires different hardware specifications, including more access to high-bandwidth memory, than those needed to train models.

In recent months, the proliferation of agentic AI, or autonomous tools that can perform tasks on their own, has caused demand for computing power to far outstrip supply. Companies like Cerebras seek to produce chips that allow AI companies to generate tokens -- the most basic unit of computing output -- as quickly as possible and lower their costs.

Last month, Nvidia, the world's biggest chip designer, announced that it would offer a new customized inference processing system that integrates chips designed by Groq, a competitor to Cerebras. Nvidia paid $20 billion last year to license Groq's technology and hire most of its leadership team.

The deal Cerebras struck with Amazon Web Services stepped up the competition by allowing AWS to better compete with the new Nvidia-Groq product. A host of chip startups and larger tech firms are currently at work developing their own inference chips.

Last month, Andrew Feldman, Cerebras' chief executive, said in an interview that his company's chips can outperform any AI computing solution in the market, and claimed that his chips' performance in what's known as fast-inference, or running AI models with extremely low response time, had persuaded OpenAI to become a customer.

OpenAI uses chips made by a variety of semiconductor firms, although it has in the past relied heavily on Nvidia's GPUs, or graphics processing units, to train and run models like ChatGPT.

"We built the fastest AI hardware for training and inference," Feldman said. "Obviously, [Nvidia] didn't want to lose the fast inference business at OpenAI, and we took that from them." Feldman declined to comment for this article through a spokeswoman, saying the company was in a quiet period following its IPO filing.

Cerebras says its chips can process "decode" tasks, the phase of inference involving response generation, up to 25 times faster than competitors' GPUs.

"Smarter models and faster inference are transforming entire sectors of the economy," Cerebras said in its filing. "But we believe we have yet to fully contemplate the growing landscape for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and other latency-sensitive applications. These applications will continue to push fast inference demand, present novel challenges, and take the industry in new directions."

As a startup, the company has attracted significant interest from investors. It raised $1 billion in Series H funding in February at a roughly $23 billion valuation, less than five months after being valued at $8.1 billion after a Series G funding round.

The most recent funding round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from AMD, Benchmark, Fidelity Management, Atreides Management, Coatue and 1789 Capital, the venture-capital firm at which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.

Cerebras said it applied to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol CBRS.

The company made a profit of $237.8 million in 2025 on $510 million in revenue, according to the filing. Stripping out certain one-time items, it posted an adjusted loss of $75.7 million.

Cerebras first filed for an IPO in September 2024 before withdrawing its filing about a year later, according to the Journal.

Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com and Elias Schisgall at elias.schisgall@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 17, 2026 18:25 ET (22:25 GMT)