Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) made a spectacular entrance onto the Nasdaq on Thursday, with shares closing up 68% at $311.07 after the AI chipmaker priced its IPO at $185 per share, itself above an already elevated expected range of $150 to $160.
The company sold 30 million shares, raising $5.55 billion in the largest initial public offering by a US technology company since Uber went public in 2019. At its first-trade opening price of $350, shares had briefly doubled from the IPO price before settling through the session.
Founded in 2016, Cerebras designs AI processors built on single silicon wafers rather than the clustered GPU architecture that Nvidia has come to dominate. Its flagship Wafer Scale Engine 3 contains approximately four trillion transistors and is designed specifically for AI inference workloads, the ongoing compute required for large language models to respond to prompts.
The company argues this architecture delivers speed and cost advantages over GPU-based alternatives, and its revenue trajectory suggests meaningful commercial validation. Revenue grew from $290 million in 2024 to $510 million in 2025, a 76% increase, and the company swung to net income of $238 million last year from a loss of $482 million the year before.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told Fortune that the demand for AI compute is not speculative, drawing a sharp distinction from previous technology investment cycles. “We’re not in a situation like Field of Dreams, where ‘if you build it, they will come,'” he said. “If you ask Anthropic, if you ask OpenAI, they have vastly more demand for their offering than they have compute to make it. And that is a profoundly different scenario.” The company’s key customers include OpenAI, Amazon Web Services, G42 in the UAE, and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, though the UAE-linked customers accounted for 86% of 2025 revenue, a concentration risk that has been widely flagged.
The IPO had been years in the making. Cerebras first filed to go public in September 2024 but withdrew after scrutiny over its reliance on a single customer in the Gulf. After diversifying its revenue base and refiling in April 2026, demand for the offering was more than 20 times oversubscribed. Underwriters hold an option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares, which if exercised would bring total proceeds to $6.38 billion. The debut is being watched as a potential bellwether for a wave of AI-related listings expected later in 2026, with SpaceX’s anticipated share sale and potential offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic all on the horizon. History suggests caution is warranted: research tracking large US IPOs from 2010 onwards shows they have underperformed comparable non-IPO firms by roughly nine percentage points on average in their first year.
