Cerebras shares rose in US premarket trading on Monday after OpenAI’s Sam Altman called the chipmaker a close partner, answering talk that Nvidia powers OpenAI’s fastest tier. The stock had fallen 14.6% in three sessions.
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) shares rose in US premarket trading today after OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman called the AI chip maker a close partner. The move is a rebound from last week’s decline.
Cerebras closed on Friday at $166.43, down 14.6% from its Tuesday close of $194.95 and 3.5% above its 52-week low of $160.81, struck on the 26th of June. That close is 57% below the $386.34 high of listing day, the 14th of May.
The sell-off followed a post from research firm SemiAnalysis suggesting OpenAI’s new Ultrafast tier runs on Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs, the graphics chips widely used for AI, rather than Cerebras hardware. Altman replied in a post today.
There is some speculation about our partnership with Cerebras. Cerebras is a close partner, and we have a deep engagement pushing on the frontiers of speed.
Sam Altman, OpenAI
Cerebras builds wafer-scale chips, each made from a whole silicon wafer, and its case against Nvidia rests on speed in inference, which means running trained AI models to answer queries. A suggestion that OpenAI’s fastest product runs elsewhere therefore strikes at the growth story directly.
OpenAI is Cerebras’ largest customer. Remaining performance obligations, signed work not yet delivered, stood at $25.4bn at the end of June. Management said on the 12th of August call that OpenAI will shrink as a share of revenue but stay meaningful in 2027.
The shares still carry a demanding valuation. The market value is about $39.5bn, or 58.09 times trailing sales. The analyst consensus target is $291.64 across 11 ratings, ten of them buy or strong buy and one hold, against a 50-day average of $201.05.
The reassurance leaves OpenAI concentration, data-centre capacity and that valuation unresolved. The next hard test is third-quarter results, expected on the 11th of November, and the US open at 2.30pm UK time will show whether the premarket gain holds.
