Cerebras is going public with the largest commercial chip ever built, $510M in 2025 revenue, and a $24.6B backlog mostly tied to OpenAI. CJ breaks down the company’s wafer-scale AI bet, why inference changed the story, the strange customer-investor-lender relationships behind the IPO, and the big question: is Cerebras the next NVIDIA-style infrastructure winner, or a concentrated hardware company with a very expensive cloud pivot?

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LINKS:

Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsN

CJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/

Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 Preview and intro

0:59 Cerebras: the dinner plate chip

3:56 Why chip size matters for AI

5:26 Old vs. new AI: inference is the bottleneck

7:30 Revenue: 20x in 3 years

7:49 Sponsors — SpendHound | Brex | Aleph

11:33 Gross margin

12:02 Net income: the one-time accounting trick

12:41 Operating cash flow whipsaw

13:24 RPO: $24.6B backlog

13:58 Customer concentration: the UAE entities

18:06 Sponsors — RightRev | Rillet | EY

21:05 Cloud revenue: the inverse SaaS story

22:23 Cloud gross margin collapse

23:53 G42 warrants for pennies

29:14 The OpenAI warrant: Funky Town

31:08 $40B market cap milestone

31:36 R&D and S&M breakdown

33:15 Balance sheet and cash burn

35:59 Red flag 1: accounting weaknesses

36:37 Red flag 2: one foundry, no supply deal

37:28 Red flag 3: UAE geopolitical risk

38:10 Red flag 4: cloud is unproven

39:02 Cap table: founders diluted

40:43 Voting control: Class A, B, and N

41:15 Valuation: 10–13x forward revenue

41:48 Peer comparison

43:47 CEO's prior issues

46:10 Credits

Nothing said or created by this podcast is business or investment advice

#RunTheNumbersPodcast #IPO #Semiconductors #AIStrategy #FinanceLeadership

Cerebras IPO: S1 Breakdown - The Giant Chip, the OpenAI Deal, and the $24B Backlog

Run the Numbers

Cerebras IPO: S1 Breakdown - The Giant Chip, the OpenAI Deal, and the $24B Backlog