Cerebras jumps 17% as Wall Street backs wafer-scale chips

Shares of Cerebras Systems rose more than 17% on Monday after nine brokerages, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS, began coverage of the company following the end of the post-listing quiet period. The analyst reports coincided with renewed investor interest in the AI chipmaker.

Analysts highlighted Cerebras’ wafer-scale engine chips, single chips roughly the size of a dinner plate that the company designs to run large AI workloads without linking many smaller GPUs. The company says the design reduces networking between chips, which it argues can make inference — generating responses and executing tasks in real time — faster and lower in latency.

Morgan Stanley opened coverage with an Overweight rating and a $250 price target, and the firm estimated that existing customer agreements could support about $6 billion in annual revenue by 2028. Citigroup set a 12-month price target of $340. Mizuho began coverage with an Outperform rating and a $300 target, while Wedbush started with a Buy rating and a $270 target. Morgan Stanley analysts led by Joseph Moore wrote, “Demand for fast, low-latency inference is growing rapidly.” Mizuho’s Vijay Rakesh wrote that Cerebras is “well-positioned as the industry leader in fast inference.” Wedbush’s Matt Bryson wrote that the company has “a differentiated architecture” and cited recent contracted revenue from large cloud customers.

Analysts flagged customer concentration as a key risk. At the end of 2025 Cerebras reported a backlog of $24.6 billion, with a sizable portion tied to a cloud-services agreement involving OpenAI. Several analysts noted the company’s relationship with Amazon Web Services as one way to expand its customer base and reduce reliance on a small number of large contracts.

Cerebras made its Nasdaq debut just over three weeks ago, pricing its IPO at $185. The stock initially jumped roughly 70% above the IPO price, then retreated more than 30% amid questions about valuation and expectations for tighter Federal Reserve policy. The company lists Amazon and OpenAI among its customers and has financial backing from OpenAI and SoftBank. Prior to the IPO, SoftBank explored taking the company private.

The rally occurred while demand for AI-related stocks remained high. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has risen about 68% this quarter and is on track for its strongest quarterly performance since 2000. Analysts who initiated coverage described Cerebras as an emerging hardware player that could challenge established chipmakers such as Nvidia as demand shifts to faster, lower-latency inference solutions.