Research firm SemiAnalysis<\/a> posted on X on Wednesday that OpenAI<\/a> will power its “Ultrafast” mode for GPT-6.1 Sol with Nvidia<\/a> graphics processing units instead of Cerebras hardware. Cerebras shares are now down by more than half since their initial pop that followed the company’s debut on the Nasdaq. <\/p>\n The stock, which closed on Friday at $166.43, was also under pressure this week due to the expiration of post-IPO restrictions on some insider shares.<\/p>\n However, it rose almost 3% in extended trading on Friday after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> responded to the “speculation about our partnership with Cerebras.”<\/p>\n “Cerebras is a close partner, and we have a deep engagement pushing on the frontiers of speed,” Altman wrote in a post on X<\/a>. <\/p>\n Stock Chart IconStock chart icon Cerebras’ stock price<\/p>\n Still, it’s been a brutal stretch for Cerebras, which closed at a $95 billion market cap on the first day of trading, just shy of joining the ranks of Meta<\/a>, Alibaba<\/a> and now SpaceX<\/a>, which closed their initial day with valuations over $100 billion.<\/p>\n Cerebras’ market cap now sits at just over $39 billion.<\/p>\n Investors were excited by the prospect of an alternative to Nvidia to power AI. Cerebras makes dinner plate-sized ASICs, or a custom microchip built for inference workloads, and leases them from inside its own data centers as a cloud service. In January, Cerebras struck a deal<\/a> worth over $10 billion with OpenAI to supply it with 750 megawatts of computing power through 2028.<\/p>\n Losing OpenAI inference to Nvidia has put a damper on that exuberance. According to McKinsey<\/a>, inference is set to surpass training as the most dominant workload in AI data centers by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, as more time passes from the IPO, additional shares will hit the market. According to the company’s prospectus, up to 19.4 million shares held by directors, officers, non-executive employees, and non-employee holders unlocked on Wednesday. That’s equal to 8% of total shares outstanding.<\/p>\n Prior to that, up to 14.6 million shares have been unlocked for sale every two weeks since Aug. 19. <\/p>\n CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie, both minted billionaires<\/a> by the IPO process, sold over $240 million of Class A shares between Aug. 20 and Sept. 25 under trading plans adopted shortly after the IPO. Other executives have also sold shares valued in the millions. <\/p>\n![\"hide](\"https:\/\/static-redesign.cnbcfm.com\/dist\/a54b41835a8b60db28c2.svg\")
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