Cerebras Surges 68% on Nasdaq Debut
CNBC reported Thursday that Cerebras Systems delivered one of the most dramatic stock market debuts in years. Shares of the AI chipmaker closed up 68% at $311.07, well above its $185 offering price. The Cerebras IPO vaulted the company to a market capitalisation of roughly $95 billion.
A Historic Opening Day for Cerebras
The Silicon Valley company priced 30 million shares late Wednesday, raising $5.55 billion. That makes it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber went public in 2019. Shares opened at $350 and briefly touched $386 before easing through the afternoon session. If underwriters exercise their option on an additional 4.5 million shares, total proceeds could climb to $6.38 billion.
CEO Andrew Feldman appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box to mark the occasion. He described the listing as “the right way to fund our growth,” per the network’s reporting.
Riding the AI Hardware Wave
Cerebras sits squarely inside one of the hottest corners of the market right now. The broader semiconductor sector has surged this year, with Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Micron all posting triple-digit gains. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has climbed 58% in 2026 alone, lifted by roaring demand for chips that power AI agents and large language models.
Cerebras competes directly with Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. The company argues its chip architecture delivers speed and cost advantages over Nvidia’s dominant graphics processing units. Nvidia acquired assets from rival startup Groq for $20 billion in December and has since announced products based on that hardware.
A Long Road to the Public Markets
The Cerebras IPO was far from straightforward. The company first filed to go public in September 2024 but withdrew its prospectus roughly a year later. Regulators and investors scrutinised its heavy dependence on a single Middle Eastern client, Microsoft-backed G42 of the United Arab Emirates, which had accounted for 85% of revenue in 2024.
Cerebras refiled in April 2026 with a substantially different customer profile. G42’s share of revenue had fallen to 24%, though the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence now represented 62%. Feldman told CNBC the work involves co-training English-Arabic language models, describing the institution as uniquely dedicated to developing AI practitioners.
Annual revenue grew 76% last year to $510 million, and the company swung to a net profit of $88 million from a loss of nearly $482 million in the prior year.
What Comes Next for Tech IPOs
The Cerebras listing could signal a reopening of the tech IPO pipeline, which had slowed sharply. Just 31 tech companies went public in 2025, versus 121 in 2021. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with xAI in February, is reportedly preparing a share sale. OpenAI and Anthropic are also widely expected to test public markets later this year.
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