Cerebras Systems soared in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday, opening at $350 after selling shares at $185, well above the company’s expected range. That values the chipmaker at over $100 billion.
The company sold 30 million shares in its offering late Wednesday, raising $5.55 billion, the largest IPO for a U.S. tech company since Uber’s debut in 2019. If underwriters exercise their option to buy 4.5 million additional shares, total proceeds could reach $6.38 billion.
Cerebras, based in Silicon Valley, is benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom, which has lifted wide swaths of the semiconductor space in recent months, with Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron all notching triple-digit gains this year. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has jumped 58% so far in 2026.
The rise of AI agents that can automatically complete tasks has boosted demand for Nvidia’s dominant graphics processing units, as well as more traditional central processing units.
Cerebras is the biggest pureplay AI IPO to hit Wall Street and the first notable tech offering in months, as the market has struggled to rebound from the downturn that began in 2022, when inflation began soaring. But investors could be in for a wave of historic IPOs with a focus on AI. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with AI company xAI in February, is gearing up for a share sale, and model developers OpenAI and Anthropic could hit the market later this year.
Andrew Feldman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cerebras Systems Inc., center left, during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Thursday, May 14, 2026.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
There were only 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years earlier, according to data from University of Florida’s Jay Ritter, an IPO expert.
Revenue at Cerebras jumped 76% last year to $510 million. The company generated net income of $88 million, swinging from a loss of $481.6 million a year earlier.
Cerebras’ most formidable competitor in hardware is Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. Cerebras claims speed and price advantages over graphics processing units from Nvidia due to architecture differences. In December, Nvidia paid $20 billion for assets from startup Groq, whose chips more closely resemble Cerebras, and months later announced plans for Groq-based products.
The IPO process for Cerebras has been long and winding. In September 2024, the company filed to go public, but withdrew its submission a little over a year later after its prospectus was heavily scrutinized due largely a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42.
Cerebras refiled to go public in April. In its refreshed prospectus, the company said 24% of revenue last year came from G42, down from 85% in 2024. However, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE accounted for 62% of revenue last year.
“There’s some whales out there, there’s some really big customers,” Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. “That is one of the characteristics of this market.”
Regarding the university work in UAE, Feldman said, “We’re training models together,” adding that they’re “English-Arabic models.”
“They are the first university set up and dedicated to training AI practitioners,” Feldman said.
Feldman, who co-founded the company in 2016, holds about 5% of voting power in the company and a stake worth close to $2 billion at the IPO price. Fidelity controls about 11%, while venture firm Benchmark has 9%.
Cerebras had started shifting its focus away from selling hardware systems and more toward providing a cloud service based on its chips. That means it’s going up against cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft, which are both listed as competitors, along with Oracle and CoreWeave.
Cerebras is working to diversify, announcing a cloud deal with OpenAI in January worth more than $20 billion that expires in 2028. In March, cloud infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services said it would set up Cerebras chips in its data centers so developers can quickly run AI models, providing another avenue to reach new customers.
Amazon and OpenAI both have warrants to purchase Cerebras stock.
The IPO was led by Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS.
WATCH: CNBC’s interview with Foundation Capital’s Steve Vassallo
