Cerebras Systems' IPO Delayed Amid National Security Review of UAE Investment

Cerebras Systems' IPO is further delayed

AI chipmaking company Cerebras Systems' IPO is delayed again as the public listing's national security review drags on. Cerebras, which originally filed its intent to IPO in September 2024, thought the incoming Trump administration would help it breeze through its national security review, according to Reuters. That hasn't been the case. The White House has yet to fill multiple vacancies, including the assistant Treasury secretary for investment security -- the position that oversees the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States -- which means the department that oversees these types of reviews is incomplete, Reuters reports. The chipmaker's IPO originally triggered a national security review due to a $335 million investment the company received from Abu Dhabi-based G42, an AI holding company, with previous ties to Chinese tech giant Huawei. TechCrunch reached out to Cerebras for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

Cerebras Systems clears hurdle on its path to IPO

Wafer-scale AI chip startup apparently smoothed over American concerns around UAE's G42 planned stake AI chip startup Cerebras Systems says it has cleared a key hurdle ahead of its planned initial public offering (IPO), claiming it resolved concerns about its sources of funding with the US Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS). Chief among the watchdog panel's worries was Cerebras' reliance on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) AI crown jewel G42, which according to the upstart's IPO filings from September, accounted for more than 87 percent of its revenues in the first half of 2024. Exports of AI accelerators and systems to Middle Eastern countries have been tightly controlled since mid-2023, requiring US chip designers to obtain special licenses to sell their wares in the region. To avoid triggering export restrictions, G42 funded the construction of several AI supercomputers based on Cerebras' wafer-scale CS2 and CS3 designs in the US to the tune of roughly $900 million with the intent of accessing them remotely. G42 had planned to acquire more than 22 million shares in Cerebras as part of the IPO. However, this apparently raised eyebrows at CFIUS. As we've previously reported, G42 has drawn scrutiny from US intelligence agencies, which reportedly feared the UAE-based firm may be providing China with advanced technologies and access to genetic data on millions of people. Those concerns ultimately drove G42 to cut ties with some suppliers including Huawei, in hopes of appeasing US export czars, and clearing roadblocks to collaborations with both Cerebras and Microsoft. Cerebras claims it addressed all outstanding CFIUS concerns by amending its agreement with G42, limiting the UAE-based tech firm to non-voting shares - a move that made further review unnecessary, Bloomberg reported on Monday. In an email to El Reg, Cerebras insisted it had resolved all objections with CFIUS, and offered no further comment. The US Treasury department declined to comment. This development comes less than a week after Reuters reported Cerebras's stock-market debut had been delayed while it waited for key Trump administration officials to be appointed. Terms of Cerebras' planned IPO have yet to be disclosed, but are expected to raise as much as $1 billion at a valuation of $7 to 8 billion, Bloomberg previously reported. While G42 remains one of Cerebras Systems' largest customers, the chip startup clearly aims to diversify its customer base with a high-performance inference-as-a-service platform backed by a massive infrastructure build out across America, Canada, and France, announced earlier this month. The upstart has promised to deploy more than a thousand of its wafer-scale accelerators across six new datacenters by the end of 2025. While that might not sound like all that many accelerators next to the hundred-thousand-plus GPU installations xAI and others are building, it's worth noting Cerebras's dinner plate-sized chip dies are supposed to each achieve up to 125 petaFLOPS at FP16, about 62x that of the Nvidia H100 series used to build the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. The majority of Cerebras' new sites will be operated in partnership with G42, which means they have first dibs on capacity. However, it will retain complete control over its Oklahoma City and Montreal, Canada sites. Along with model training, Cerebras is pushing high-throughput inference for reasoning models like DeepSeek's R1 distill of Llama3.3 70B, as a key differentiator. The chip designer claims its systems can serve up models of this size at speeds up to 1,508 tokens per second -- far faster than conventional GPU-based providers, according to benchmarks recorded by Artificial Analysis. ®

Exclusive: Cerebras IPO further delayed as US national security review drags on

NEW YORK, March 25 (Reuters) - Cerebras Systems executives were hoping the Trump administration would wave through a national security review that has left the AI chipmaker's IPO in limbo for months, five sources familiar with the matter said. Instead, the company's highly anticipated listing has been delayed further as executives wait for the White House to fill key appointments and to wrap up the review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is confidential. The most recent delay, which has not been previously reported, is the latest example of how bets that U.S. President Donald Trump would be a boon for dealmaking have not panned out for Wall Street so far. CFIUS, which is led by the Treasury Department, reviews foreign investment in American companies for national security risks. The sticking point for California-based Cerebras is CFIUS's review of a $335 million investment by Abu Dhabi-based cloud computing and AI company G42. The UAE company's past ties to China have drawn scrutiny in Washington before, but its stake in Cerebras appeared poised for approval late last year. Cerebras, a smaller competitor to industry leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab in the booming AI chip market, faces risks in going public without clarity on G42's investment, two of the sources said. Investors like certainty, and without it, raising money on the open markets becomes more complicated. With the change at the White House just two months ago, key political positions remain unfilled, including the assistant Treasury secretary for investment security, who oversees CFIUS. While career and political staff currently in place have the authority to approve the deal, the inclusion of G42 made it politically risky over its past ties to China's Huawei (HWT.UL), several CFIUS attorneys said. CFIUS staffers might be even less inclined to risk a controversial approval on big, politically sensitive deals after seeing billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk's team at the Department of Government Efficiency cut thousands of workers in a bid to slash federal payrolls and root out disloyalty, national security lawyers said. Career staff also need to establish trust with the new administration on delicate national security issues, said Jim Secreto, a former Treasury and Commerce official in the Biden administration. "With a new administration, CFIUS staff naturally want to brief incoming policymakers and get their sign off before moving forward with a high-profile case," he said. "That's a delicate and difficult dance, especially with an administration who has been so openly hostile to nonpartisan technical experts they refer to as the 'deep state,'" he added. Cerebras and the Treasury Department declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. It is not unusual for presidents to take months to fill non-cabinet-level positions at key agencies. G42 declined to comment on the CFIUS process. "G42's progress in the U.S. and in key European markets reflects the growing confidence in our role collectively building the Intelligence Grid for responsible AI," it said in a statement to Reuters. TOUGH ON CHINA The easier regulatory environment envisioned by bankers and CEOs when Republican Trump took office from former Democratic President Joe Biden is not panning out as well as many had hoped, corporate executives and dealmakers say. The Biden administration expanded CFIUS enforcement and created new rules governing U.S. investment in Chinese high-tech companies, and the Trump administration is unlikely to scale any of that back, Jason Chipman, a partner at law firm WilmerHale, wrote in a February analysis. "Indeed, it is more likely that the new Trump team will build on Biden's efforts to aggressively evaluate inbound and outbound investment, particularly with regard to China," he said. While Trump laid out new parameters last month that "fast-track" foreign investments in U.S. companies, they further restrict those coming from China, particularly in strategic sectors like tech. That is bad news for companies like G42, which is a major investor in and the largest customer of Cerebras. It had close ties with China's Huawei before Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab gave it $1.5 billion. To get the investment cleared, it had to cut Huawei off and sign a national security agreement with the U.S. last year. Despite the holdup, Cerebras executives remain confident that the deal will eventually go through and intend to proceed with the IPO once it receives approval, according to three people familiar with their thinking. Cerebras and G42 jointly filed to notify CFIUS of the investment. They later amended the filing, stating that the shares G42 would acquire are non-voting securities, which they argued should not be subject to CFIUS review. Last September, the companies requested to withdraw the filing altogether, and CFIUS is now considering that request, according to Cerebras' IPO filing. Cerebras, valued at about $8 billion following G42's investment commitment in May last year, has since nearly doubled its valuation, one of the people said. If the investment wins approval, G42 would end up with a stake of more than 5% in the company. Cerebras is currently building a series of AI data centers for G42, and its technology has been used to train the Arabic large language model that Microsoft is using in its Azure AI platform. Reporting by Echo Wang in New York and Alexandra Alper in Washington Additional reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Matthew Lewis Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence Echo Wang Thomson Reuters Echo Wang is a correspondent at Reuters covering U.S. equity capital markets, and the intersection of Chinese business in the U.S, breaking news from U.S. crackdown on TikTok and Grindr, to restrictions Chinese companies face in listing in New York. She was the Reuters' Reporter of the Year in 2020.

AI chipmaker Cerebras announces CFIUS clearance, a key step toward IPO

Toronto , Canada - 20 June 2024; Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, speaks at the Collision conference in Toronto on June 20, 2024. Artificial intelligence chip developer Cerebras said Monday that it has obtained clearance from a U.S. committee to sell shares to Group 42, a Microsoft-backed AI company based in the United Arab Emirates. That clearance came from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, and it's a key step for Cerebras in its effort to go public. Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are the industry's choice for training and running AI models, but most of its revenue comes from a customer called Group 42. Cerebras filed to go public in September but has not provided details on timing or size for the initial public offering. The regulatory overhang was tied to the company's relationship with Group 42, which was the source of 87% of Cerebras' revenue in the first half of 2024, made the IPO look uncertain. "We thank @POTUS for making America the best place in the world to invest in cutting-edge #AI technology," Andrew Feldman, Cerebras' co-founder and CEO, wrote in a Monday LinkedIn post. "We thank G42's leadership and the UAE's leadership for their ongoing partnership and commitment to supporting U.S headquartered AI companies." Lawmakers have previously worried about Group 42's connections to China. Last year Mike Gallagher, then a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, said in a statement that he was "glad to see G42 reduce its investment exposure to Chinese companies." Microsoft later announced a $1.5 billion investment in Group 42. Both Cerebras and Group 42 had given voluntary notice to CFIUS about the sale of voting shares, according to the Sunnyvale, California-based company's IPO prospectus. Group 42 had agreed to buy $335 million worth of Cerebras shares by April 15, according to the prospectus. The two companies later changed the agreement to say Group 42 would be buying non-voting shares, prompting them to withdraw their notice, because they said they did not believe CFIUS had jurisdiction over sales of non-voting securities. CFIUS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Just a handful of technology companies have gone public since 2021, as higher interest rates made unprofitable companies less desirable. But in recent months, Cerebras and a few technology-related companies have taken steps toward IPOs, and last week, AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave went public. CoreWeave shares fell 7% on Monday, its second day of trading.

Cerebras Systems faces delays in IPO as CFIUS review remains unresolved - SiliconANGLE

Cerebras Systems faces delays in IPO as CFIUS review remains unresolved Artificial intelligence chip-making company Cerebras Systems Inc.'s initial public offering has reportedly been delayed due to the company not yet obtaining national security clearance to proceed from the Trump Administration. According to Reuters, referencing "five sources familiar with the matter," Cerebras executives are waiting for the White House to fill key appointments and to wrap up the review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. CFIUS approval is needed for the IPO due to an investment from Abu Dhabi-based cloud computing and AI company G42, a company that has previously had ties to China. Cerebras produces specialized computer chips designed to handle AI and high-performance computing workloads. Last year, the company made headlines for claiming that its chips are not only more powerful than Nvidia Corp.'s graphics processing units but also more cost-effective. Without getting into an argument about who has the better AI chip, the fact that Cerebras makes cutting-edge AI chips in the U.S. immediately makes it of national security interest and it's that interest that has delayed the IPO so far. The current delay arises due to the White House not yet appointing an assistant Treasury secretary for investment security, who oversees CFIUS. Reuters' sources claim that while staff in CFIUS have the authority to approve the deal, the inclusion of G42 makes it politically risky and it's a risk they're seemingly not willing to take until they have someone appointed by the administration to make the final call. Thrown into the mix are apparent concerns that CFIUS staffers might also be less inclined to approve large, sensitive deals at a time when government employees are being cut as part of the Trump Administration's Department of Government Efficiency initiative under Elon Musk. While blame for the delay is being attributed to the Trump Administration, the controversial aspect pre-dates the last U.S. election and G42 has already been in the spotlight previously over concerns about its China links, particularly when Microsoft Corp. invested $1.5 billion into the company in April 2024. Clearly anticipating issues under the previous administration, Cerebras and G42 amended a filing to the CFIUS to state that the shares G42 would acquire are non-voting securities, which they argued should not be subject to CFIUS review; this was always going to be an issue no matter who was in power. The companies then apparently requested to withdraw the filing altogether in September, two months before the election and CFIUS has been considering the request since then. While it's unclear how long Cerebras will have to wait, executives are said to remain confident that the deal will eventually go through and intend to proceed with the IPO once it receives approval.

Cerebras IPO Delayed as Treasury Department Reviews Relationship with G42

Ongoing concerns about Cerebras' relationship with G42 are behind CFIUS's delayed approval | Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images. Six months after Cerebras Systems filed its Initial Public Offering (IPO) paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Treasury Department has yet to complete a crucial national security review. The Treasury's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is reportedly probing the company's relationship with G42, an Emirati AI firm with links to China. G42 Cerebras Investment G42 initially became involved with Cerebras in 2021, investing around $40 million in the startup's Series F funding round. From that point onward, G42 also became Cerebras' largest customer, contracting the firm to help it build a series of AI supercomputers. As part of its IPO application, Cerebras revealed that in 2023, G42 accounted for 83% of its annual revenue. The two companies' partnership was further cemented in 2024 when G42 moved to significantly increase its stake. As revealed by Cerebras' IPO filing, G42 or its affiliates have agreed to purchase $335 million in additional shares by April 2025, which would raise the group's overall ownership to over 5%. National Security Concerns According to Reuters , ongoing concerns about Cerebras' relationship with G42 are behind CFIUS's delayed approval. It is unusual for an IPO not to be cleared within 12 weeks of filing the necessary paperwork. For years, American security analysts have raised concerns about G42's close links to China. In the past, the Abu Dhabi-based AI company has worked with sanctioned Chinese enterprises like BGI Group and Huawei. As a major developer of AI chips, Cerebras is heavily bound by U.S. sanctions designed to curb China's access to advanced semiconductors. Given G42's ties to Chinese partners, this creates challenges for Cerebras' proposed IPO. Under President Donald Trump, CFIUS has been instructed to streamline its review process to accelerate investment. However, when it comes to foreign investments that could be linked to China, particularly in the technology sector, the administration has requested that the Treasury actually intensify its vetting process.

Cerebras IPO further delayed as U.S. national security review drags on

NEW YORK -- Cerebras Systems executives were hoping the Trump administration would wave through a national security review that has left the AI chipmaker's IPO in limbo for months, five sources familiar with the matter said. Instead, the company's highly anticipated listing has been delayed further as executives wait for the White House to fill key appointments and to wrap up the review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is confidential. The most recent delay, which has not been previously reported, is the latest example of how bets that U.S. President Donald Trump would be a boon for dealmaking have not panned out for Wall Street so far. CFIUS, which is led by the Treasury Department, reviews foreign investment in American companies for national security risks. The sticking point for California-based Cerebras is CFIUS's review of a US$335 million investment by Abu Dhabi-based cloud computing and AI company G42. The UAE company's past ties to China have drawn scrutiny in Washington before, but its stake in Cerebras appeared poised for approval late last year. Cerebras, a smaller competitor to industry leader Nvidia in the booming AI chip market, faces risks in going public without clarity on G42's investment, two of the sources said. Investors like certainty, and without it, raising money on the open markets becomes more complicated. With the change at the White House just two months ago, key political positions remain unfilled, including the assistant Treasury secretary for investment security, who oversees CFIUS. While career and political staff currently in place have the authority to approve the deal, the inclusion of G42 made it politically risky over its past ties to China's Huawei, several CFIUS attorneys said. CFIUS staffers might be even less inclined to risk a controversial approval on big, politically sensitive deals after seeing billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk's team at the Department of Government Efficiency cut thousands of workers in a bid to slash federal payrolls and root out disloyalty, national security lawyers said. Career staff also need to establish trust with the new administration on delicate national security issues, said Jim Secreto, a former Treasury and Commerce official in the Biden administration. "With a new administration, CFIUS staff naturally want to brief incoming policymakers and get their sign off before moving forward with a high-profile case," he said. "That's a delicate and difficult dance, especially with an administration who has been so openly hostile to nonpartisan technical experts they refer to as the 'deep state,'" he added. Cerebras and the Treasury Department declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. It is not unusual for presidents to take months to fill non-cabinet-level positions at key agencies. G42 declined to comment on the CFIUS process. "G42's progress in the U.S. and in key European markets reflects the growing confidence in our role collectively building the Intelligence Grid for responsible AI," it said in a statement to Reuters. The easier regulatory environment envisioned by bankers and CEOs when Republican Trump took office from former Democratic President Joe Biden is not panning out as well as many had hoped, corporate executives and dealmakers say. The Biden administration expanded CFIUS enforcement and created new rules governing U.S. investment in Chinese high-tech companies, and the Trump administration is unlikely to scale any of that back, Jason Chipman, a partner at law firm WilmerHale, wrote in a February analysis. "Indeed, it is more likely that the new Trump team will build on Biden's efforts to aggressively evaluate inbound and outbound investment, particularly with regard to China," he said. While Trump laid out new parameters last month that "fast-track" foreign investments in U.S. companies, they further restrict those coming from China, particularly in strategic sectors like tech. That is bad news for companies like G42, which is a major investor in and the largest customer of Cerebras. It had close ties with China's Huawei before Microsoft gave it US$1.5 billion. To get the investment cleared, it had to cut Huawei off and sign a national security agreement with the U.S. last year. Despite the holdup, Cerebras executives remain confident that the deal will eventually go through and intend to proceed with the IPO once it receives approval, according to three people familiar with their thinking. Cerebras and G42 jointly filed to notify CFIUS of the investment. They later amended the filing, stating that the shares G42 would acquire are non-voting securities, which they argued should not be subject to CFIUS review. Last September, the companies requested to withdraw the filing altogether, and CFIUS is now considering that request, according to Cerebras' IPO filing. Cerebras, valued at about US$8 billion following G42's investment commitment in May last year, has since nearly doubled its valuation, one of the people said. If the investment wins approval, G42 would end up with a stake of more than 5% in the company. Cerebras is currently building a series of AI data centers for G42, and its technology has been used to train the Arabic large language model that Microsoft is using in its Azure AI platform. ---

Exclusive-Cerebras IPO further delayed as US national security review drags on

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cerebras Systems executives were hoping the Trump administration would wave through a national security review that has left the AI chipmaker's IPO in limbo for months, five sources familiar with the matter said. Instead, the company's highly anticipated listing has been delayed further as executives wait for the White House to fill key appointments and to wrap up the review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is confidential. The most recent delay, which has not been previously reported, is the latest example of how bets that U.S. President Donald Trump would be a boon for dealmaking have not panned out for Wall Street so far. CFIUS, which is led by the Treasury Department, reviews foreign investment in American companies for national security risks. The sticking point for California-based Cerebras is CFIUS's review of a $335 million investment by Abu Dhabi-based cloud computing and AI company G42. The UAE company's past ties to China have drawn scrutiny in Washington before, but its stake in Cerebras appeared poised for approval late last year. Cerebras, a smaller competitor to industry leader Nvidia in the booming AI chip market, faces risks in going public without clarity on G42's investment, two of the sources said. Investors like certainty, and without it, raising money on the open markets becomes more complicated. With the change at the White House just two months ago, key political positions remain unfilled, including the assistant Treasury secretary for investment security, who oversees CFIUS. While career and political staff currently in place have the authority to approve the deal, the inclusion of G42 made it politically risky over its past ties to China's Huawei, several CFIUS attorneys said. CFIUS staffers might be even less inclined to risk a controversial approval on big, politically sensitive deals after seeing billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk's team at the Department of Government Efficiency cut thousands of workers in a bid to slash federal payrolls and root out disloyalty, national security lawyers said. Career staff also need to establish trust with the new administration on delicate national security issues, said Jim Secreto, a former Treasury and Commerce official in the Biden administration. "With a new administration, CFIUS staff naturally want to brief incoming policymakers and get their sign off before moving forward with a high-profile case," he said. "That's a delicate and difficult dance, especially with an administration who has been so openly hostile to nonpartisan technical experts they refer to as the 'deep state,'" he added. Cerebras and the Treasury Department declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. It is not unusual for presidents to take months to fill non-cabinet-level positions at key agencies. G42 declined to comment on the CFIUS process. "G42's progress in the U.S. and in key European markets reflects the growing confidence in our role collectively building the Intelligence Grid for responsible AI," it said in a statement to Reuters. TOUGH ON CHINA The easier regulatory environment envisioned by bankers and CEOs when Republican Trump took office from former Democratic President Joe Biden is not panning out as well as many had hoped, corporate executives and dealmakers say. The Biden administration expanded CFIUS enforcement and created new rules governing U.S. investment in Chinese high-tech companies, and the Trump administration is unlikely to scale any of that back, Jason Chipman, a partner at law firm WilmerHale, wrote in a February analysis. "Indeed, it is more likely that the new Trump team will build on Biden's efforts to aggressively evaluate inbound and outbound investment, particularly with regard to China," he said. While Trump laid out new parameters last month that "fast-track" foreign investments in U.S. companies, they further restrict those coming from China, particularly in strategic sectors like tech. That is bad news for companies like G42, which is a major investor in and the largest customer of Cerebras. It had close ties with China's Huawei before Microsoft gave it $1.5 billion. To get the investment cleared, it had to cut Huawei off and sign a national security agreement with the U.S. last year. Despite the holdup, Cerebras executives remain confident that the deal will eventually go through and intend to proceed with the IPO once it receives approval, according to three people familiar with their thinking. Cerebras and G42 jointly filed to notify CFIUS of the investment. They later amended the filing, stating that the shares G42 would acquire are non-voting securities, which they argued should not be subject to CFIUS review. Last September, the companies requested to withdraw the filing altogether, and CFIUS is now considering that request, according to Cerebras' IPO filing. Cerebras, valued at about $8 billion following G42's investment commitment in May last year, has since nearly doubled its valuation, one of the people said. If the investment wins approval, G42 would end up with a stake of more than 5% in the company. Cerebras is currently building a series of AI data centers for G42, and its technology has been used to train the Arabic large language model that Microsoft is using in its Azure AI platform. (Reporting by Echo Wang in New York and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Additional reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Matthew Lewis)