Arm and SoftBank Tried to Acquire Cerebras Before Its $5.5 Billion IPO

Arm and SoftBank Group attempted to acquire Cerebras weeks before its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO). Their offer was, however, rebuffed by the AI chipmaker.

The two companies have shown preliminary interest in buying Cerebras but were turned down. The company raised $5.5 billion in its IPO, which was launched on 13 May, giving it a value of $40 billion. A strong demand led to Cerebras pricing its IPO at $185 per share. It had previously set a target of between $150 to $160 per share, aiming to raise roughly $4.8 billion.

The IPO puts it in the same league as Arm’s own record-setting semiconductor IPO in 2023. The chipmaker is positioning itself as a credible challenger to Nvidia, which dominates the market for chips used to train and run AI software. In January 2026, Cerebras announced a multi-year agreement with OpenAI, which the AI company valued at over $20 billion. OpenAI is committed to deploying 750 megawatts of Cerebras compute, and the two companies agreed to co-design future hardware and models together.

In March 2026, Amazon Web Services signed a binding term sheet to become the first hyperscaler to deploy Cerebras inside its own data centres. For SoftBank, the failed bid marks a broader pattern of its interest in AI. The Japanese technology conglomerate has been aggressively expanding its exposure to chipmaking, having closed a $6.5 billion acquisition of server processor maker Ampere Computing late last year.