Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) made a dramatic market debut on May 14, pricing its IPO at $185 per share before opening at $350.
The AI chipmaker’s stock has since retreated sharply from those early highs, now trading around $205 per share.
That figure still represents an 11% gain over the IPO price, though investors who chased the opening surge are now sitting on losses.
Cerebras takes a fundamentally different approach to chip design compared to rivals like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), building massive AI processors on a single silicon wafer rather than cutting them into smaller individual chips.
The company claims its plate-sized chips sidestep the networking bottlenecks, data latency, and power constraints that typically plague traditional GPU cluster configurations.
Cerebras generates revenue by selling its wafer-scale processors and CS-3 systems, and by providing cloud-based access to its wafers for customers running inference tasks.
The company recently landed a multi-year $20 billion deal with OpenAI to deploy 750 megawatts of its wafer-scale inference systems, a contract that underscores its growing commercial traction.
Cerebras is also integrating its CS-3 systems into Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services, the world’s largest cloud infrastructure platform.
Core revenue, which excludes pass-through costs like utility, power, and real estate expenses, surged 76% to $510 million in 2025.
The company expects that figure to climb a further 68% to 70%, reaching between $855 million and $865 million in 2026.
A backlog of $25 billion provides strong revenue visibility and suggests the growth trajectory is unlikely to stall anytime soon.
Gross margins are under pressure as Cerebras rents back computing capacity from its own customers while building out its own data center infrastructure.
That margin compression is expected to ease as first-party infrastructure expands, though the company will likely remain unprofitable in the near term.
With a market cap of $46.4 billion, CBRS currently trades at 54 times this year’s projected sales, a premium that reflects high growth expectations.
Analysts project revenue of $7.32 billion by 2028, representing a 143% three-year compound annual growth rate from 2025 levels, implying just six times forward sales at today’s price.
Adjusted EBITDA is expected to turn positive in both 2027 and 2028, offering a clearer path toward profitability as the business scales.
The stock will likely remain volatile given current broader market conditions, but the company’s backlog and expanding partnerships present a compelling long-term case for patient investors.
