On Friday afternoon, The Information broke a number that should have stopped the AI industry in its tracks. OpenAI had quietly committed to spending more than $20 billion on Cerebras servers over the next three years. The deal could balloon to $30 billion. Buried four paragraphs down was the part nobody in Silicon Valley wants to say out loud: OpenAI is also getting warrants for up to 10% of Cerebras.

They are not just a customer. They are the customer, the investor, and the reason the company is about to IPO.

Cerebras was last valued at $23.1 billion. Next month it plans to raise $3 billion in a public offering targeting a $35 billion valuation. That's a $12 billion markup in one quarter. What changed? OpenAI signed a bigger check. Cerebras's revenue story for Wall Street is now functionally "OpenAI pays us a lot." And OpenAI just bought the option to own a tenth of whatever the public markets decide that story is worth.

The math is even weirder than it looks. OpenAI is also handing Cerebras around $1 billion in separate funding to build data centers that will house the chips OpenAI is buying. So OpenAI gives Cerebras a billion dollars. Cerebras uses it to build infrastructure. OpenAI then pays Cerebras to run workloads on that infrastructure. OpenAI's equity stake in Cerebras appreciates because of the revenue OpenAI is providing. Then Cerebras goes public on that revenue and OpenAI cashes in.

This isn't a supply agreement. It's a closed loop.

The Pattern Is Everywhere Now

The Cerebras deal is double the size of the one OpenAI signed in January, which was worth $10 billion for 750 megawatts of computing capacity. Back then, Sam Altman said the partnership was about reducing dependence on Nvidia. Four months later, "reducing dependence" apparently means acquiring an ownership stake in your second supplier so big that the supplier's existence as a public company depends on your continued purchase orders.

This is the same pattern Nvidia pulled with CoreWeave. Same pattern Microsoft pulled with OpenAI itself. The money keeps moving in circles between the same six companies, and each loop gets counted as new revenue, new valuation, new growth. The AI industry calls this "ecosystem building." Accountants used to call it something else.

Here's what makes it worse: Cerebras tried to IPO in 2024 and got blocked over CFIUS concerns tied to a Saudi investor. They withdrew the filing. Two years later, they're coming back with a $20 billion anchor order from OpenAI and a partial OpenAI ownership stake. The regulatory problem hasn't gone away. It's just been papered over with a bigger check.

My Opinion

I'll be blunt. This is what a bubble looks like when it's mostly happening in private markets.

The defenders will say this is normal strategic partnership behavior. That OpenAI needs compute so badly it's willing to underwrite suppliers to get it. That Cerebras deserves the valuation because its wafer-scale chips are genuinely differentiated. Some of that is true. But none of it explains why a company that couldn't IPO on its merits in 2024 is suddenly worth $35 billion in 2026 on the back of purchase commitments from a customer that happens to be its second-largest shareholder.

When the revenue is circular, the valuation is circular, and the IPO exists to let the people who manufactured the revenue cash out, that's not a market. That's a scheme with better branding. And retail investors are about to buy the top of it, because OpenAI's logo is on the prospectus and nobody at Goldman is going to ask the uncomfortable question in the roadshow.

The uncomfortable question is simple. If OpenAI stopped buying, what would Cerebras be worth? Ask that before you put $35 billion on the scoreboard.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark) / www.humai.blog / 18 Apr 2026