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Inside the Cerebras IPO
The AI IPO wave is underway.
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) priced its IPO at $185 per share on May 13 — then opened at $350. Shares closed the first day up 68% at $311.07, putting the company's market cap at $67 billion.
It's the largest IPO of 2026. And the biggest U.S. tech debut since Uber went public in 2019.
Here's what actually happened with the Cerebras deal.
The company lifted its offering price twice in the week before listing — starting at a preliminary $115 and ending at $185. It also increased the number of shares available. That's a classic signal of oversubscribed institutional demand. By the time pricing was final, Cerebras had raised at least $5.6 billion.
Market cap briefly touched $95 billion at the open before settling at $67 billion by the close. Only two tech companies have ever closed their first day above $100 billion — Alibaba and Facebook.
So why did this one work?
Three things lined up.
First, the AI chip story. Cerebras builds the largest computer chip in the world — the size of a dinner plate, roughly 100x bigger than a typical chip. Its Wafer Scale Engine 3 is built for AI inference, and the company claims it runs faster than Nvidia's GPUs on certain workloads. That's a real technical differentiator in the hottest sector on Wall Street.
Second, the customer wins. Cerebras signed a $20 billion deal with OpenAI earlier this year, plus a separate agreement with Amazon Web Services. Both deals landed before the IPO — and gave institutional investors the validation they needed.
Third, the financials finally caught up. Revenue hit $510 million last year, up from $290 million in 2024. The company reported a $238 million profit, compared with a $482 million loss the prior year. Andrew Feldman, the CEO, said his business "exploded" once AI models became commercially useful in early 2025.
One detail worth flagging: customer concentration is still high. G42 — the UAE-based AI company that drove the original 2024 IPO delay — accounted for 24% of revenue last year. A research lab in the U.A.E. accounted for another 62%. That's better than the 87% G42 concentration in the 2024 filing, but it's still a heavy reliance on a small group of buyers.
Here's what this means for the broader IPO pipeline.
Cerebras just proved the AI IPO window is open. SpaceX is next — with an expected $2 trillion valuation. OpenAI and Anthropic are both prepping debuts later this year. Each of those could be larger than Cerebras by an order of magnitude.
Plus, smaller IPOs are actually delivering some of the biggest gains.
Here’s one Pre-IPO that you may find interesting.
Ian Wyatt
Editor, IPO Watch