Cerebras Surges 89% in Nasdaq Debut, Raising $5.55 Billion in Largest U.S. Tech IPO Since Uber

Cerebras Systems opened at $350 per share on Thursday — 89% above its $185 IPO price — surpassing a $100 billion market capitalization on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, as Wall Street bet heavily on the AI chipmaker's long-term prospects.

The Silicon Valley company sold 30 million shares in its offering late Wednesday, raising $5.55 billion in what analysts say is the largest initial public offering for a U.S. technology company since Uber's 2019 debut. If underwriters exercise an option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares, total proceeds could climb to $6.38 billion.

Shares peaked above $385 before drifting lower Thursday afternoon to around $310, pulling the company's market capitalization to approximately $95 billion.

The IPO was led by Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS.

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman, who co-founded the company in 2016, holds roughly 5% of voting power and a stake valued at close to $2 billion at the IPO price. Fidelity controls about 11% of the company, while venture firm Benchmark holds 9%.

Feldman described the offering as a milestone for the ten-year-old company. "This is the right way to fund our growth," he said in remarks Thursday morning.

Revenue at Cerebras jumped 76% last year to $510 million, and the company posted net income of $88 million — a sharp swing from a loss of $481.6 million the year prior.

Cerebras competes most directly with Nvidia in AI hardware, claiming speed and cost advantages rooted in architectural differences. In December, Nvidia paid $20 billion for assets from startup Groq — whose chip design more closely resembles Cerebras' approach — and later announced plans for Groq-based products.

The company has spent much of 2026 diversifying its customer base after facing scrutiny during an earlier, abandoned IPO attempt. In September 2024, Cerebras filed to go public but withdrew the submission after its prospectus drew heavy scrutiny over its dependence on a single customer: G42, a Microsoft-backed firm based in the United Arab Emirates.

Cerebras refiled in April, with an updated prospectus showing that G42 accounted for 24% of last year's revenue, down from 85% in 2024. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE, however, accounted for 62% of revenue last year.

"There's some whales out there, there's some really big customers," Feldman told CNBC. "That is one of the characteristics of this market."

On the university relationship, Feldman said the company is "training models together," describing the work as developing "English-Arabic models." He noted that the institution is "the first university set up and dedicated to training AI practitioners."

To broaden its reach, Cerebras announced a cloud deal with OpenAI in January valued at more than $20 billion that runs through 2028. In March, Amazon Web Services said it would deploy Cerebras chips in its data centers, giving developers an additional channel to run AI models. Both Amazon and OpenAI hold warrants to purchase Cerebras stock.

The debut arrives as the broader technology IPO market shows signs of revival after a prolonged dry spell. There were only 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years earlier, according to data from IPO researcher Jay Ritter at the University of Florida. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has gained 58% so far in 2026.

Several high-profile offerings may follow. Elon Musk's SpaceX — which merged with AI company xAI in February — is preparing for a share sale, while model developers OpenAI and Anthropic could also seek public listings later this year, signaling that the appetite for AI-focused offerings remains far from exhausted.

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