Cerebras IPO: Should You Buy or Stay Away?

AI chipmaker Cerebras is set to launch its highly anticipated IPO, and it plans to do so at a hefty price. In fact, Cerebras sharply increased its estimated IPO price range to $150 to $160 per share, compared with $115 to $125 per share in regulatory filings just last week.

At the high end of the range, this implies a roughly $49 billion valuation for Cerebras, with the company raising as much as $4.8 billion in proceeds through the offering. That's more than double the valuation Cerebras got in its latest funding round just three months ago.

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Obviously, Cerebras' IPO is attracting plenty of investor interest. But should you buy Cerebras on its IPO day (or shortly after)? Or should you wait until we have a few quarters of results as a public company before jumping in?

The bull case for Cerebras

The main bull case is that Cerebras' product is truly unique. It doesn't produce just a refular chip -- it is many times larger than a single Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPU and houses many gigabytes of memory directly on the wafer. This results in much faster inference, which could be a big advantage in the next wave of the AI buildout.

Specifically, AI is shifting from a focus on training models (where Nvidia's GPUs dominate) to running them. Cerebras has a big advantage when it comes to running models (inference workloads), where speed is a much more important factor.

It's also worth noting that an exponential growth phase is likely to follow the IPO. Cerebras generated $510 million in revenue last year, but consider that the company has a multi-year agreement with OpenAI valued at more than $20 billion, where OpenAI will rely on Cerebras specifically for an AI model that writes code.

Reasons to be cautious

The most obvious reason to approach the IPO in "wait and see" mode is Cerebras' valuation. Given the current IPO range and Cerebras' $510 million in 2025 revenue, the stock is likely to go public at about 95 times sales. It's fair to say that there's a lot of future growth priced in.

There's also significant customer concentration risk, with 86% of revenue coming from just two customers, both based in the UAE. Of course, the massive OpenAI and AWS deals should help mitigate this risk, but it's worth keeping in mind. And now Cerebras is essentially trading a high concentration in a pair of customers for a high concentration in OpenAI.

In recent history, the major tech IPOs have been extremely volatile, and some have performed quite poorly. For example, Figma (NYSE: FIG) was arguably the most-hyped tech IPO of 2025, and not only did shares more than triple on the first trading day, but they now trade about 40% below the IPO price.

The bottom line is that it's important to approach IPOs (especially the most hyped ones) with caution. If you want to invest in Cerebras, there's nothing wrong with taking a wait-and-see approach as the IPO hype settles, or of gradually building a position over a period of a few months instead of putting all your money in at the IPO. But whatever you decide to do, be prepared for quite a rollercoaster ride.

Matt Frankel, CFP has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Figma and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.