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.
Over on LinkedIn, Andrew Feldman, CEO of California-based Cerebras, gushed: "I am pleased to announce that working closely with our strategic partner G42, Cerebras Systems has reached a positive resolution with CFIUS and is moving forward."
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. ®