Biden CFIUS Held the IPO
for 18 Months. 86% of Revenue
Is Still Emirati. Cerebras Just
Priced at $48.8 Billion.
On May 11, 2026, Cerebras Systems — the wafer-scale AI chipmaker challenging Nvidia — raised its IPO range to $150–$160 per share on 30 million Class A shares, targeting gross proceeds of approximately $4.8 billion at a fully-diluted valuation of roughly $48.8 billion. The book is oversubscribed more than 20-to-1. Pricing is scheduled for the evening of May 13; trading begins May 14 on the Nasdaq under ticker CBRS.
The path to this listing was political. Cerebras filed its original S-1 in September 2024. The Biden-era Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) opened a national-security review of the company’s relationship with G42, the Abu Dhabi AI conglomerate that held a minority stake and was simultaneously its largest customer. The review ran 18 months. By all public accounts the political delay was tied to an unfilled “Assistant Secretary for Investment Security” slot at Treasury. The deal closed only after G42 restructured to non-voting shares in October 2025.
The structural concern that triggered the CFIUS review has not disappeared. The IPO prospectus shows that G42 and MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI) — both inside the same Emirati sovereign-tech apparatus — together accounted for 86% of Cerebras’s 2025 revenue. The only meaningful diversification is a January 2026 Master Relationship Agreement with OpenAI for $10 billion-plus and 750 megawatts of inference compute through 2028, since upsized toward $20 billion. The market is pricing Cerebras as if the AI inference gold rush is larger than the geopolitical risk.
- $48.8Bfully-diluted valuation at high endRaised from $26.6B target the week prior; book oversubscribed >20x.
- $150–$160raised price rangeUp from $115–$125 the prior week; share count bumped from 28M to 30M Class A.
- 86%of 2025 revenue from UAEG42 + MBZUAI customer concentration — the structural concern that triggered the 18-month CFIUS review remains.
- $10B+OpenAI Master Relationship AgreementJanuary 14, 2026 — 750MW through 2028, since upsized toward $20B; the only meaningful diversification.
- CBRSNasdaq tickerPricing May 13, 2026 evening; trading begins May 14. Morgan Stanley, Citi, Barclays, UBS leading the syndicate (Goldman not in syndicate).
September 2024:Cerebras files its original S-1 with the SEC. The CFIUS review of G42’s minority stake (acquired earlier in 2024 with a related ~$900M+ customer contract) opens almost immediately.
October 2024: Reuters reports the IPO will be postponed pending CFIUS resolution.
The institutional bottleneck:The Senate-confirmed Treasury post responsible for the final sign-off — Assistant Secretary for Investment Security — was unfilled. The case sat. Throughout 2024 and into 2025, G42 simultaneously restructured its corporate footprint, divested certain Chinese holdings, and took on a Microsoft partnership in a parallel effort to scrub its CCP-adjacent ties.
September 2025: The original S-1 is withdrawn.
October 2025:CFIUS clears the restructured deal — G42’s remaining stake converted to non-voting shares.
April 17, 2026:Cerebras refiles. The roadshow opens May 4 at $115–$125. Demand drives the range up twice in a week to $150–$160. May 13 pricing.
“NVIDIA didn't want to lose the fast inference business at OpenAI, and we took that from them.”
Andrew Feldman · Co-founder & CEO, Cerebras Systems · WSJ interview
2024: G42 = 85% of Cerebras revenue.
2025: G42 = 24% of revenue. MBZUAI = 62% of revenue. Combined: 86%. Both are inside the same Abu Dhabi sovereign-tech apparatus.
Year-end 2025 accounts receivable:77.9% from MBZUAI — a Mohamed-bin-Zayed-founded AI university.
Diversification:The OpenAI MRA (January 2026, $10B+, later upsized toward $20B) is the first major customer outside the UAE’s sovereign-tech orbit. Until it ramps, the revenue base remains where CFIUS spent 18 months worrying about it.
Cerebras’s thesis is that a single chip the size of a dinner plate — built on TSMC’s 3nm node, ~4 trillion transistors, 900,000 cores, the entire die etched as one wafer-scale processor — beats Nvidia’s package-level architecture on the part of the AI workload that is now growing fastest: inference. The company claims its WSE-3 is roughly 58 times larger than Nvidia’s B200 chip with 2,625 times the memory bandwidth, and delivers inference up to 21x faster on Llama-3.1 405B at over 1,000 tokens per second. Those numbers come from the company’s own S-1 marketing and should be read accordingly. The point is that OpenAI looked at them and signed.
The story of the CBRS listing is not whether Cerebras’s wafer can match Nvidia’s package. The story is that the U.S. capital markets are about to publicly list a national-security-sensitive AI chip company whose two biggest customers operate inside an authoritarian Gulf state that the Biden Treasury spent eighteen months worrying might be a backdoor to Beijing. The upsized IPO is a market verdict on that worry. Whether the verdict is correct is the question that CFIUS, Congress, and the next administration will be answering for years.
Biden Treasury sat on the Cerebras IPO for 18 months over G42. CFIUS finally cleared the deal in October 2025 after the UAE went non-voting. The IPO is now priced at $48.8 billion with a book oversubscribed 20x. 86% of revenue still comes from Abu Dhabi. The market just decided the inference gold rush is bigger than the geopolitical risk. Whether it’s right is the next administration’s problem.