Brain systems soared in its Nasdaq debut Thursday, opening at $350 after selling shares at $185, well above the company’s expected range. That values the chipmaker at more than $100 billion.
The company sold 30 million shares in its offering Wednesday evening, raise $5.55 billionthe largest IPO for an American technology company since Uber debut in 2019. If the underwriters exercise their option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares, total proceeds could reach $6.38 billion.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras is taking advantage of the artificial intelligence boom, which has affected large parts of the semiconductor sector in recent months, with Intel, Advanced microdevices And Micron all triple-digit gains this year. THE VanEck Semiconductor ETF has jumped 58% so far in 2026.
The rise of AI agents capable of automatically performing tasks has driven demand for from Nvidia dominant graphics processing units, as well as more traditional central processing units.
Cerebras is the largest pureplay AI IPO on Wall Street and the first notable tech offering in months as the market has struggled to rebound from the downturn that began in 2022, when inflation began to soar. But investors could face a wave of landmark AI-focused IPOs. That of Elon Musk SpaceX, which merged with AI company xAI in February, is preparing to sell its shares, and model developers OpenAI and Anthropic could hit the market later this year.
Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems Inc., center left, during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., Thursday, May 14, 2026.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
There were only 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years earlier, according to data from Jay Ritter of the University of Florida, an IPO expert.
Cerebras’ revenue jumped 76% last year to $510 million. The company generated net income of $88 million, compared to a loss of $481.6 million a year earlier.
Cerebras’ most formidable hardware competitor is Nvidiathe most valuable company in the world. Cerebras claims speed and price advantages over Nvidia’s graphics processing units due to architectural differences. In December, Nvidia paid 20 billion dollars for the assets of the startup Groq, whose chips more closely resemble Cerebras, and months later announced plans for Groq-based products.
The Cerebras IPO process was long and tortuous. In September 2024, the company filed for an IPO, but withdrew its submission just over a year later, after its prospectus was scrutinized largely due to a strong dependence on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-G42 supported.
Cerebras refiled to go public in April. In its updated prospectus, the company said 24% of last year’s revenue came from the G42, up from 85% in 2024. However, the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence accounted for 62% of revenue last year.
“There are whales out there, there are very big customers,” Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC on Thursday. “It’s one of the characteristics of this market.”
Regarding academic work in the UAE, Feldman said: “We train models together,” adding that these are “Anglo-Arab models.”
“This is the first university established and dedicated to training AI practitioners,” Feldman said.
Read more CNBC tech newsFeldman, who co-founded the company in 2016, has about 5% voting power in the company and a stake worth nearly $2 billion at the IPO price. Fidelity controls about 11%, while venture capital firm Benchmark owns 9%.
Cerebras had begun to move away from selling hardware systems and focus more on providing a cloud service based on its chips. This means it goes up against cloud providers such as Google And Microsoftboth of which are listed as competitors, alongside Oracle And CoreWeave.
Cerebras is working towards its diversification by announcing a cloud agreement with OpenAI in January worth over $20 billion that expires in 2028. In March, the leader in cloud infrastructure Amazon Web Services said it would install Cerebras chips in its data centers so developers can quickly run AI models, providing another avenue to reach new customers.
Both Amazon and OpenAI have mandates to purchase Cerebras shares.
The IPO was led by Morgan Stanley, Citi Group, Barclays And UBS.
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