ARM AND SOFTBANK JUST TRIED TO BUY AI CHIPMAKER CEREBRAS BEFORE THE IPO Cerebras turned them down. The full picture, per Bloomberg: The approach: • Arm Holdings $ARM and majority owner SoftBank made a preliminary acquisition approach weeks before the IPO • Cerebras rebuffed the offer • Representatives for all three companies declined to comment The IPO is happening anyway: • Cerebras expected to price today at $185 per share, above the marketed $150-$160 range • 30 million shares in the offering • Order book was 20x+ oversubscribed • On track to be the biggest IPO of the year so far, rivaling Arm's own record semiconductor IPO in 2023 Why the strategic interest: • SoftBank has been increasing its chipmaking exposure (acquired Ampere Computing for $6.5B late last year) • Arm is pivoting from licensing-only to offering its own chip lineup for the first time • Arm shares are roughly +100% YTD on AI data center optimism Why Cerebras held out: • Founder and CEO Andrew Feldman is positioning the company as a direct NVIDIA $NVDA challenger • Technology: giant chips made from a single disk of silicon (vs typical small chips from one wafer) • OpenAI is a customer and released a model trained on Cerebras chips earlier this year