Cerebras Storms Wall Street in One of Tech’s Biggest-Ever IPOs

CNBC reported Thursday that Cerebras IPO activity electrified Wall Street, as the Silicon Valley chipmaker closed its first trading session with a market capitalisation just under $100 billion. The debut placed Cerebras among the largest tech listings in recent memory. Shares pulled back 10% on Friday during the company’s first full day of trading.

A Dinner-Plate Chip Challenges Nvidia’s Dominance

Cerebras does not make conventional graphics processing units. Its flagship WSE-3 processor is an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, and is roughly the size of a dinner plate. Cerebras CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Feldman told CNBC that the chip is 57 times larger than the biggest available GPU and carries 50 times the transistor count.

The key distinction is purpose. Nvidia GPUs remain dominant for training large AI models, handling vast parallel calculations with exceptional versatility. Cerebras targets the inference stage instead, where a trained model processes new inputs to generate real-time responses. Inference can run on less powerful, more task-specific hardware, which is exactly where ASICs like the WSE-3 excel.

The WSE-3 is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company on a 5-nanometer process node, one generation behind TSMC’s cutting-edge 2-nanometer offering.

Also Read: What Is AI Inference and Why Does It Matter for Chip Stocks

A Long Road to the Public Markets

Cerebras was founded in 2016 and first attempted to go public in 2024, before withdrawing its filing under regulatory scrutiny. Regulators raised concerns about the firm’s heavy dependence on a single customer, G42, a Microsoft-backed AI company based in the United Arab Emirates. The successful 2026 listing cleared those hurdles and minted two new billionaires. Co-founders Feldman and hardware chief Sean Lie both saw their stakes cross the ten-figure threshold.

Cloud Deals and a Sold-Out Order Book

Cerebras has shifted its business model over recent years. Rather than selling chips directly to clients, it now operates them inside its own data centres as a managed cloud service. That positions it against heavyweights including Google, Microsoft, Oracle and CoreWeave.

The company announced a $20 billion cloud partnership with OpenAI in January, running through 2028. Amazon Web Services separately confirmed in March it is deploying Cerebras chips within its own infrastructure. CFO Bob Komin told CNBC the firm is sold out on fast inference capacity through 2027.

The IPO also opens the door for rival ASIC makers. Groq, SambaNova, Rebellions and D-Matrix are all watching the market closely. Nvidia itself paid $20 billion for Groq’s technology in December, underscoring just how seriously the GPU giant is treating the ASIC threat.

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