Cerebras, an A.I. Chipmaker Trying to Take On Nvidia, Files for an I.P.O.

For two years, stock investors wanting in on the frenzy around artificial intelligence have had only a few tech industry options: big companies like Microsoft and Nvidia. But that is set to change in the coming weeks with the market debut of Cerebras, a chip company with bold ambitions to take on Nvidia.

Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., unveiled its investor prospectus on Monday, taking an important step toward listing its shares on the stock market. In doing so, the start-up aims to break the drought of hot I.P.O.s and take advantage of investor excitement for all things A.I.

Just 82 companies went public in the United States in the first half of the year, a slight uptick from last year, according to datacollected by EY. Only 24 of them, including the social network Reddit and the data security company Rubrik, were venture-capital-backed start-ups. In May, Crunchbase News calculated that, at the current pace, it would take 49 years for all private start-ups based in the United States valued at $1 billion or more to go public.

Even though conditions to go public are good — interest rates are falling, and tech stocks are trading up — many companies have pushed I.P.O. plans to 2025, hoping to avoid any market volatility caused by the presidential election.

“It’s almost like a wait-and-see type of environment,” said Mark Schwartz, an I.P.O. advisory leader at EY.

Cerebras would be among the first A.I. companies to go public since OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. Tempus A.I., a health care company, and Astera Labs, a semiconductor company, both listed their shares this year.

There has been some concern that A.I. hype has far outpaced reality, with gloomy reports from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital. But the demand for A.I. products continues to grow.

In August, Nvidia, which owns 90 percent of the market for chips used for A.I., reported that its revenue in the three months ending in July had more than doubled from a year earlier. Profits also jumped nearly threefold, though Nvidia’s stock has dropped about 11 percent since its peak in June.

Cerebras makes a specialized chip for building artificial intelligence technologies and delivering them to businesses and consumers.

The company revealed it brought in $136 million in revenue in the first six months of 2024, an increase of more than 15-fold from $8.6 million year earlier. It reported a loss of $67 million in the first six months of the year, a slight decrease from a loss of $78 million in the same period the year prior.

Andrew Feldman, Cerebras’s chief executive and co-founder, talked up his plans to take on Nvidia at a press event in August. When a reporter asked how much market share Cerebras could take from the industry leader, he quickly responded, “All of it.” He then amended his answer to say, “Enough to make them angry.”