Cerebras (CBRS) starts trading on Nasdaq after IPO

Cerebras Systems soared in its Nasdaq debut on 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 late Wednesday, raising $5.55 billion, the largest initial public offering for a U.S. tech company since Uber’s debut in 2019. If underwriters exercise their option to buy 4.5 million additional shares, total proceeds could reach $6.38 billion.

After peaking at above $385, the stock drifted lower Thursday afternoon to about $310, bringing the market cap to $95 billion.

Cerebras, based in Silicon Valley, is benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom, which has lifted wide swaths of the semiconductor space in recent months, with Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron all notching triple-digit gains this year. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has jumped 58% so far in 2026.

The rise of AI agents that can automatically complete tasks has boosted demand for Nvidia’s dominant graphics processing units, as well as more traditional central processing units.

Cerebras is the biggest pureplay AI IPO to hit 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 soaring. But investors could be in for a wave of historic IPOs with a focus on AI. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with AI company xAI in February, is gearing up for a share sale, and model developers OpenAI and Anthropic could hit the market later this year.

There were only 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years earlier, according to data from the University of Florida’s Jay Ritter, an IPO expert.

Revenue at Cerebras jumped 76% last year to $510 million. The company generated net income of $88 million, swinging from a loss of $481.6 million a year earlier.

Cerebras’ most formidable competitor in hardware is Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. Cerebras claims speed and price advantages over graphics processing units from Nvidia due to architecture differences. In December, Nvidia paid $20 billion for assets from startup Groq, whose chips more closely resemble Cerebras, and months later announced plans for Groq-based products.

The IPO process for Cerebras has been long and winding. In September 2024, the company filed to go public, but withdrew its submission a little over a year later after its prospectus was heavily scrutinized due largely a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42.

Cerebras refiled to go public in April. In its refreshed prospectus, the company said 24% of revenue last year came from G42, down from 85% in 2024. However, the…