CEREBRAS Systems stock fell nearly 20 percent this week, closing at $166.43 on Friday—its lowest price since the company's May IPO and down more than half from its $350 opening day close.
The primary catalyst was a SemiAnalysis report stating OpenAI will use Nvidia GPUs to power GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast mode, bypassing Cerebras custom silicon despite a January agreement worth $10 billion. That deal stipulated Cerebras would provide 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028.
The snub matters because Cerebras built its business model around inference workloads—specialized AI tasks expected to dominate data center spending by the end of the decade, according to McKinsey research. The company leases its dinner-plate-sized custom ASICs from its own cloud data centers. Losing OpenAI's inference workload to a rival suggests Cerebras's custom silicon strategy faces deeper market headwinds than its May IPO implied.
A secondary pressure came from the expiration of post-IPO restrictions on insider holdings. This week unlocked 19.4 million shares—8 percent of shares outstanding—held by directors, officers and other non-employee holders. An additional 14.6 million shares had been released every two weeks since Aug. 19.
CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie sold over $240 million in Class A shares between Aug. 20 and Sept. 25 under pre-arranged trading plans adopted after the IPO. Other executives executed sales valued in the millions.
Cerebras went public at $185 per share and opened its first trading day at $350, valuing the company at $95 billion—just below Meta, Alibaba and SpaceX. Today's $166.43 close values Cerebras at just over $39 billion, a 59 percent decline from debut. For investors who bought at the opening price, the loss exceeds 50 percent in less than six months.
