Cerebra Systems soared on Thursday’s Nasdaq debut, opening at $350 after selling shares at $185, well above the company’s expected range. This would value the chipmaker at more than $100 billion.
The company sold 30 million shares in an offering late Wednesday, raising $5.55 billion and making it the largest IPO for a U.S. tech company since. Uber’s If the underwriters exercise their option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares, total proceeds could reach $6.38 billion.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras is benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom that has swept across the semiconductor industry in recent months. intel, advanced micro device and micron All posted triple-digit increases this year. of VanEck Semiconductor ETF By 2026, it had increased by 58%.
With the rise of AI agents that can complete tasks automatically; Nvidia’s A primary graphics processing unit and a more traditional central processing unit.
Cerebras is the biggest pure AI IPO to hit Wall Street and the first high-profile tech stock listing in recent months as the market struggles to recover from the recession that began in 2022 when inflation began to soar. But investors could be caught up in a historic wave of AI-focused IPOs. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with AI company xAI in February, is preparing to sell its stake, and model developers OpenAI and Anthropic could enter the market later this year.
Andrew Feldman (center left), co-founder and CEO of Cerebra Systems, Inc., during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Marketsite on Thursday, May 14, 2026, in New York, USA.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
There will be just 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years ago, according to data from IPO expert Jay Ritter of the University of Florida.
Cerebras’ revenue rose 76% last year to $510 million. The company’s net income was $88 million, up from a loss of $481.6 million in the same period last year.
Cerebras’ toughest hardware competitors are Nvidiathe world’s most valuable company. Cerebras claims it has speed and price advantages over Nvidia’s graphics processing units due to architectural differences. In December, Nvidia paid $20 billion for the assets of startup Groq, whose chips are more similar to Cerebras, and announced plans for Groq-based products a few months later.
Cerebras’ IPO process was long and tortuous. The company filed to go public in September 2024, but withdrew the filing just over a year later after its prospectus came under intense scrutiny due to its heavy reliance on Microsoft-backed G42, a single customer in the United Arab Emirates.
Cerebras reapplied to list in April. The company said in its updated prospectus that 24% of its revenue last year came from G42, down from 85% in 2024. However, 62% of last year’s revenue came from the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.
“There are whales out there, and there are really big customers out there,” Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. That’s one of the characteristics of this market.
“We’re training models together,” Feldman said of his university studies in the UAE, adding that they are “models in English and Arabic.”
“They were the first university founded specifically to train AI practitioners,” Feldman said.
Feldman, who co-founded the company in 2016, owns about 5% of the company’s voting power and a stake worth nearly $2 billion at its IPO price. Fidelity controls about 11% and venture firm Benchmark holds 9%.
Cerebras had begun to shift its focus from selling hardware systems to offering cloud services based on its chips. This means competing with cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft, which are listed as competitors. oracle and core weave.
Cerebras has been working to diversify, announcing a more than $20 billion cloud deal with OpenAI in January that expires in 2028. Amazon Web Services said it will install Cerebras chips in its data centers to help developers quickly run AI models, giving them new ways to acquire new customers.
Amazon and OpenAI both have stock options to purchase Cerebras stock.
The IPO was led by Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS.
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