SoftBank and Arm Tried to Acquire Cerebras Before IPO Pricing, But Were Rejected

According to Bloomberg citing sources with knowledge of the matter, Arm and its major shareholder, SoftBank Group, made preliminary contact to acquire Cerebras shortly before the AI computing company's expected IPO, but Cerebras rejected the proposal. Cerebras is expected to determine the IPO issue price on Wednesday, with an estimated market valuation of around $34 billion.

The contact occurred in the final stage before Cerebras's market pricing for its listing. The company had previously signaled to potential investors that it planned to set the issue price above the range of $150 to $160. If priced at the upper limit of the range, this IPO is expected to raise approximately $4.8 billion, potentially making it the largest public offering so far this year.

The acquisition interest of Arm and SoftBank has reinforced the pricing focus on Cerebras as a rare asset in AI chips. Cerebras chips are considered more suitable for handling the inference tasks when AI models respond to user queries, and the company has secured Amazon and OpenAI as core customers. The company is attempting to position itself as a challenger to NVIDIA in the AI training and inference chip space during this listing.