Cerebras Stock Slumps Amid Nvidia Partnership News and Lockup Expiration
Cerebras Systems Inc., which went public in May with a monster IPO, has seen its stock plummet nearly 20% this week to its lowest price since its debut. The company's shares are now down by more than half from their initial pop. This decline comes as Nvidia is set to power OpenAI's latest model, the 'Ultrafast' mode for GPT-6.1 Sol, instead of Cerebras hardware.
The report from SemiAnalysis on X, a social media platform, sparked concern among investors who had been enthusiastic about Cerebras' alternative to Nvidia in powering AI. Cerebras makes custom microchips, or ASICs, for inference workloads and leases them from its own data centers as a cloud service.
The company's deal with OpenAI, worth over $10 billion, to supply 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028, has also been impacted. As more time passes since the IPO, additional shares will hit the market, further pressuring the stock. Cerebras' CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie sold over $240 million of Class A shares between Aug. 20 and Sept. 25 under trading plans adopted shortly after the IPO.
In response to speculation about their partnership with Cerebras, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that 'Cerebras is a close partner, and we have a deep engagement pushing on the frontiers of speed.'