Arm and SoftBank Wanted to Acquire Cerebras Before Record IPO: Here’s What Happened

Arm Holdings and SoftBank Group have reportedly made a preliminary proposal to acquire Cerebras Systems, a company specialized in hardware for artificial intelligence, in the weeks leading up to the anticipated stock market listing. According to sources close to the negotiations, the proposal was rejected by the U.S. company.

Cerebras operates in a market dominated by NVIDIA, which maintains a leadership position, but plays in a separate league, at least from a technological standpoint: the company offers a proprietary architecture based on extremely large chips manufactured on a single silicon wafer (Wafer Scale Engine), in contrast to GPUs or other ASICs.

Cerebras's solution aims to improve AI system performance and reduce latency, with an evolution compared to that seen with the adoption of broadband networks in communication systems. Among its clients, the company boasts OpenAI for the training of artificial intelligence models, in addition to AWS.

Setting aside the assault on the carriage, Cerebras has set the IPO price at $185 per share, above the expected range. The IPO has generated $5.55 billion for Cerebras, thanks to the sale of 30 million shares, according to a statement released in recent hours. Underwriters have the option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares. At the listing price, Cerebras now has a valuation of $56.4 billion.

SoftBank's interest in Cerebras reflects a broader strategy of strengthening the Japanese conglomerate towards the creation of vertically integrated companies capable of designing hardware and optimizing software for artificial intelligence workloads. The group has completed the $6.5 billion acquisition of Ampere Computing, a company specialized in server processors, and has injected nearly $460 million into Graphcore.

Simultaneously, Arm Holdings is expanding its business model, evolving from an architecture licensee to a direct designer of proprietary chips - an example being the new AGI CPU. Arm's shares have recorded significant growth over the year, supported by expectations of expansion in AI and high-performance computing systems.