Cerebras Systems Is Being Called the Next Nvidia, But 2 Surprising Details Change the Story

Cerebras Systems (CBRS) burst onto the scene on May 14 in a stellar IPO that saw its shares get priced at $185, well above the initial range of $115 to $125. The company raised $5.55 billion, and the stock opened for trading at $385. We’ve become used to AI stocks surging, but this one really made investors’ heads spin. As if that wasn’t enough, the stock then went down nearly 20% within the first few days of trading.

The stock gained a lot of attention primarily because of the parallels with Nvidia (NVDA), so let’s get that out of the way first. The reason people call it the next Nvidia is that the company’s product is specifically built for AI workloads. Just like Nvidia designed its GPU architecture keeping the AI training requirements in mind, Cerebras is designing its entire architecture around solving the memory bandwidth problem. Its wafer-scale engine (WSE) single-chip design reduces the interconnect losses that cause overhead in multi-GPU systems.