Cerebras pulled off its IPO, raising $5.55 billion by selling 30 million shares at $185 each, making it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019.
Demand for the stock was so strong that bankers repeatedly lifted the offering price, the company originally aiming for a $4.8 billion raise earlier in the week. Reuters reported that orders for the deal exceeded more than 20 times the number of shares available.
The first day of trading was striking: shares opened at $350 on the Nasdaq, well above the IPO price of $185. The stock even traded as high as $385 shortly after debuting, before trading was briefly halted due to volatility. It ultimately closed up 68% at $311. The following day, the price fell about 4%.
A Wafer-Size Chip as Large as a Dinner Plate
Founded in 2015 in Sunnyvale, California, Cerebras built its identity around a bold bet: to design chips the size of a dinner plate that accelerate processing by packing hundreds of thousands of compute cores onto a single processor.
This oversized design, an architecture known as wafer-scale, eliminates the need to interconnect many smaller chips, which can slow down responses to AI users’ queries.
The company’s flagship product, the Wafer Scale Engine 3, is a massive processor built from a single silicon wafer rather than many smaller chips. Cerebras claims that its chips run faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.
Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras, had set out more than a decade ago to build a chip for the AI market, and he acknowledges that it took far longer than he initially anticipated.
This listing marks the company’s second attempt to go public after withdrawing an earlier filing the year before. Its partnership with G42, a UAE-based AI firm that accounted for more than 85% of its 2024 revenue, had triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The committee ultimately approved the deal.
Cerebras reports an operating loss of $146 million on revenue of $510 million in 2025, with revenues up 76% year over year. Less than a year ago, it was valued at $8.1 billion in private funding.
A Long Road Full of Obstacles
Revenue concentration remains a major vulnerability. 86% of last year’s revenue came from two government-backed entities in the United Arab Emirates.
Cerebras recently struck a $20 billion deal with OpenAI that envisions deploying up to 750 MW of Cerebras chips and joint hardware design. The company has also formed partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Meta, and AI startups Mistral, Cognition, and Windsurf.
However, Cerebras will recognize only about 15% of the $24.6 billion listed on its current order book over the next two years. And the chip-supply agreement for Amazon’s AWS service will not move into full production until next year.
Cerebras is one of many contenders for Nvidia’s throne, whose market share sits at around 80%, according to IDC. Nvidia’s AI business revenue is more than 400 times Cerebras’ and continues to grow almost as fast.
