A sign for Cerebras Systems Inc. during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Market site on Thursday, May 14, 2026 in New York, USA.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
cerebrum The semiconductor giant’s stock price plunged nearly 20% this week following the report, its lowest since the company’s monster IPO in May. Nvidia Powers critical parts of OpenAI’s latest models.
Research firm Semianalysis posted on X on Wednesday that OpenAI will power GPT-6.1 Sol’s “Ultrafast” mode with Nvidia graphics processing units instead of Cerebras hardware. Cerebras stock has now fallen by more than half since its initial share price after the company listed on the Nasdaq.
The company’s stock, which closed at $166.43 on Friday, remained under pressure this week after post-IPO restrictions on some insider shares expired.
Cerebras stock price
It was a significant fall for Cerebras, which closed on its first day of trading with a market capitalization of $95 billion, leaving it one step short of joining the ranks of Meta, Alibaba and now SpaceX, which all closed with valuations of more than $100 billion on their first day of trading.
Cerebras’ market capitalization currently stands at just over $39 billion.
Investors were excited by the prospect of Nvidia’s alternative to power AI. Cerebras manufactures dinner plate-sized ASICs, custom microchips built for inference workloads, and leases them as cloud services from within its own data centers. In January, Cerebras signed a more than $10 billion deal with OpenAI to provide 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028.
The loss of OpenAI inference to Nvidia put a damper on all the excitement. According to McKinsey, inference will surpass training as the most dominant workload in AI data centers by the end of the decade.
On the other hand, as time passes after the IPO, additional shares will come to market. Up to 19.4 million shares held by directors, officers, non-executive employees and non-employee holders were unlocked on Wednesday, according to the company’s prospectus. This is equivalent to 8% of the total number of outstanding shares.
Prior to that, up to 14.6 million shares have been unlocked for sale every two weeks since August 19.
CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lee, both of whom became billionaires through the IPO process, sold more than $240 million in Class A stock between August 20 and September 25 under a trading plan adopted shortly after the IPO. Other executives also sold millions of dollars worth of stock.
Watch: CNBC’s full interview with Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman
