Shares of Cerebras Systems (CBRS) climbed nearly 2% on Friday after Freedom Capital upgraded the chipmaker to Buy from Hold. The vote of confidence arrived just days after the stock tumbled 17% on fears about its relationship with OpenAI.

Analyst Paul Meeks set a $209 price target on the shares and called the market’s reaction to the headlines “exaggerated,” saying the OpenAI concerns pose only a minor threat to the company. The stock had been trading near its post-I lows before the upgrade, and the bounce offered only a partial recovery from the week’s decline. The swings showed how quickly sentiment around a newly public chipmaker can pivot on headlines about a single customer relationship.

The selloff that set the stage for the call was triggered by reports that OpenAI is using Nvidia GPUs to power a faster version of its GPT model. Investors took that as a signal that OpenAI might be leaning less on Cerebras hardware going forward. Nvidia’s GPUs dominate the market for AI computing, and Cerebras is one of several challengers vying for a share of that business.

Meeks pushed back on that interpretation. He said the market’s punishment of the stock was “exaggerated” and described the OpenAI threat as minor even if the reports turn out to be accurate.

His $209 target sits below the Street average of $292, but it marks a shift in tone from Freedom Capital, which had held a Hold rating since before the company’s initial public offering.

The rating change followed a volatile stretch for the newly public company, whose shares had slid to within a few dollars of their post-IPO low before Friday’s rebound.

Why the Analyst Sees Opportunity

Meeks pointed to demand in the AI inference space, saying it is expected to outpace supply for years to come. He believes Cerebras will keep landing deals with partners such as AMD and Amazon Web Services regardless of what OpenAI does with Nvidia chips.

The thesis leans heavily on Cerebras’ Wafer Scale Engine technology, which is built to handle AI inference tasks efficiently. Meeks sees that as a structural advantage as the industry shifts toward running AI models rather than just training them — inference being the phase in which a trained model generates answers to user requests. True to its name, the Wafer Scale Engine packs the circuitry of an entire silicon wafer into a single chip, a design meant to cut the data movement that slows large models.

He also flagged a possible hybrid setup in which GPUs handle the initial prefill work on a request, while Cerebras chips take over for the faster decode stage. In that division of labor, prefill processes the prompt a user submits, while decode generates the answer token by token — the step that determines how quickly responses appear. That kind of split workload could keep Cerebras relevant even in a GPU-heavy pipeline.

The Numbers Behind the Call

The heart of the bull case is a steep growth trajectory. Wall Street currently projects Cerebras revenue jumping from an estimated $887 million this year to $2.95 billion by 2027 — a more than threefold increase in just two years.

Analysts following the stock say hitting that target depends largely on execution, specifically whether Cerebras can bring new power and manufacturing capacity online on time and on budget.

Shares were trading at $172.50 at the time of the upgrade, just above the post-IPO low of $169 set in May 2026.

Freedom Capital’s $209 target is described as the most conservative price target on the Street. The $83 gap between it and the $292 Street average shows how widely analyst views on the company’s prospects diverge. The firm says it has been a fan of the Wafer Scale Engine technology since before the IPO but was waiting for a better entry price before upgrading. With shares having pulled back, that wait appears to be over.

The firm frames the current price as a favorable entry point for long-term investors willing to look past short-term noise around the OpenAI headlines and focus on the company’s underlying technology.

Cerebras stock remains above its post-IPO low but still carries the scars of the week’s drop. The next test will be whether the company’s order book with AMD and AWS continues to grow at the pace analysts are counting on — and whether revenue tracks toward the Street’s projected climb to $2.95 billion by 2027.