May 4 (Reuters) - Nvidia-rival Cerebras Systems, which makes chips for artificial intelligence workloads, is aiming to raise $3.5 billion in its U.S. initial public offering.
Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras is aiming to sell 28 million shares in the offering, priced between $115 and $125 apiece in the company's second attempt to go public after withdrawing a previous IPO filing last October.
The company is known for its wafer-scale engine chips, designed to speed up the training and inference of large AI models, placing it in direct competition with Nvidia and other AI hardware firms.
The surge in AI adoption has set off a sharp rise in demand for the high-performance chips needed to train and run complex models, turning semiconductors into a key bottleneck in the technology supply chain.
As companies race to build out AI infrastructure such as data centers and cloud services, chipmakers have emerged as some of the biggest beneficiaries, with Nvidia leading the pack, as strong investor interest lifts valuations across the sector.
Cerebras' revenue rose to $510 million in the year ended December 31, up from $290.3 million a year earlier. It also reported a profit of $1.38 per share, a turnaround from a loss of $9.90 per share a year earlier.
Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS are the lead underwriters for the offering.
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York and Rhea Rose Abraham and Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Devika Syamnath)
