Cerebras IPO shares nearly doubled on their first day of trading, opening at $350 after pricing at $185 per share on Wednesday evening.
Summary
- Cerebras raised $5.55 billion at $185 per share and opened Thursday at $350, the largest US tech IPO since Uber’s 2019 debut.
- The AI chipmaker carries a market capitalisation above $100 billion with OpenAI and Amazon Web Services as anchor customers.
- The debut is seen as a bellwether for a broader AI listing wave with OpenAI and SpaceX targeting later-year offerings in 2026.
Cerebras IPO shares opened at $350 on Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker CBRS, nearly doubling from the $185 per-share price set the evening before. The AI chipmaker raised $5.55 billion from 30 million shares, making it the largest IPO by a US technology company since Uber’s 2019 debut.
At the open, Cerebras carried a market capitalisation above $100 billion. Shares were halted briefly for volatility before trading around $324 in the afternoon. If underwriters exercise their option to buy an additional 4.5 million shares, total proceeds could reach $6.38 billion.
The offering priced well above its initial range of $115 to $125 per share, which was revised upward twice before landing at $185. The company had previously withdrawn its IPO filing before refiling on renewed investor interest. Cerebras reported $510 million in revenue and $237.8 million in net income for 2025, a sharp reversal from a near-$500 million net loss the year before.
The Nvidia challenger
Cerebras builds chips based on its Wafer-Scale Engine architecture, designed to handle large language model workloads more efficiently than clusters of traditional GPUs. OpenAI has committed to $20 billion in chip purchases from Cerebras, and Amazon Web Services has deployed the company’s CS-3 system on Amazon Bedrock.
CEO Andrew Feldman told reporters that demand for Cerebras chips, used for AI inference specifically, is not speculative. “We’re not in a situation like Field of Dreams, where ‘if you build it, they will come,’” Feldman said. “If you ask Anthropic, if you ask OpenAI, they have vastly more demand for their offering than they have compute to make it.”
The Cerebras debut is being read on Wall Street as a bellwether for a coming pipeline of AI listings. OpenAI is targeting a regulatory filing in the second half of 2026 after crossing $25 billion in annualised revenue. SpaceX, which merged with xAI in February, is separately eyeing a June Nasdaq listing at a reported valuation of up to $1.75 trillion.
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has gained 58% in 2026 as capital floods into AI hardware. Cerebras is the first significant pureplay AI chip IPO on US markets and the first notable tech offering in months, giving investors their clearest read yet on public market appetite for AI infrastructure at scale.
