Cerebras Stock Falls 20% to Post-IPO Low on Nvidia Report — SkimNews
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- Cerebras stock fell nearly 20% this week, closing Friday at $166.43 — its lowest price since the company's May IPO on the Nasdaq — with shares now down more than half from their post-debut peak.
- SemiAnalysis posted on X Wednesday that OpenAI will power its "Ultrafast" mode for GPT-6.1 Sol with Nvidia GPUs rather than Cerebras hardware, the report that triggered the week's selling.
- Sam Altman pushed back on the speculation Friday, writing on X that "Cerebras is a close partner, and we have a deep engagement pushing on the frontiers of speed" — sending Cerebras up roughly 3% in extended trading.
- Cerebras market cap has collapsed from $95 billion on its first trading day to just over $39 billion, putting it well below the $100B-plus club of Meta, Alibaba, and SpaceX.
- Post-IPO lockup restrictions expired Wednesday, freeing 19.4 million shares — 8% of shares outstanding — held by directors, officers, and non-employee holders, with 14.6 million more unlocking every two weeks since Aug. 19.
- CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie, both made billionaires by the IPO, sold more than $240 million in Class A shares between Aug. 20 and Sept. 25 under trading plans adopted shortly after the listing.
- Cerebras struck a deal in January worth over $10 billion to supply OpenAI with 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028, using dinner plate-sized ASICs it leases from its own data centers.
Why it matters: If OpenAI routes its fastest inference mode to Nvidia rather than Cerebras, the central bull thesis behind Cerebras's $95 billion debut valuation cracks — McKinsey projects inference will surpass training as the dominant AI data-center workload by decade's end. The 8% lockup share dump arriving the same week as insider sales of $240M+ means retail buyers are absorbing float just as the company's flagship OpenAI partnership shows visible strain.
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