Cerebras hits post-IPO low as market worries OpenAI may shift orders to NVIDIA
Cerebras Systems shares fell 10.69% on Oct. 12 to $146.62, a record low since its May IPO and more than 20% below the $185 offer price and over 60% below its post-listing high. According to Barron's, investors fear that its largest customer OpenAI is moving some AI inference workloads to NVIDIA: the research firm SemiAnalysis said OpenAI's new GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast runs on NVIDIA GPUs rather than Cerebras silicon. About $20 billion of Cerebras's roughly $24.6 billion revenue backlog comes from OpenAI, and roughly 19.4 million shares are due to be unlocked from lock-up on Oct. 14, potentially adding selling pressure. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly backed Cerebras earlier this month, briefly lifting the stock before it slid again.
It highlights how dependent AI chip startups are on a single large customer, and that inference hardware choices can shift quickly.