Cerebras pops 68% in Nasdaq debut to hit $95 billion valuation

Cerebras Systems shares surged 68 per cent in their first day of trading on the Nasdaq on Wednesday, closing at $311.07 after the artificial intelligence chipmaker priced its initial public offering at $185 a share, giving the company a market capitalisation of roughly $95 billion.

The listing, which raised $5.55 billion selling 30 million shares, is the largest US technology IPO since Uber went public in 2019.

Cerebras, founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie, builds wafer-scale chips that compete with Nvidia’s graphics processing units for training large AI models. Its flagship WSE-3 processor, a single chip the size of a dinner plate, packs 4 trillion transistors and is designed to handle workloads that would require hundreds of conventional GPUs.

The company reported $510 million in revenue for 2025, up 76 per cent from the prior year, while swinging to a net profit of $88 million from a loss of $481.6 million, according to regulatory filings.

Shares opened at $350, roughly 89 per cent above the offer price, before settling lower through the session. The $185 IPO price was well above an initial range that bankers had raised twice during the marketing roadshow, reflecting what multiple underwriters described as the strongest institutional demand for a semiconductor offering in over a decade.

“There’s some whales out there, there’s some really big customers. That is one of the characteristics of this market,” Feldman, the chief executive, said in an interview after the debut. He added that the IPO was “the right way to fund our growth,” pointing to what he called “tremendous opportunities” as cloud providers and governments ramp up their artificial intelligence infrastructure spending.

Nvidia controls an estimated 80 per cent or more of the data-centre GPU segment. Cerebras has carved out a niche selling integrated systems that pair its processors with specialised cooling and networking hardware, targeting customers who need to train large models at speed.

The company’s most prominent disclosed customer is G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm. Roughly 70 per cent of the company’s 2025 revenue came from just two customers, a concentration that some analysts flagged as a risk factor in the run-up to the offering.

Eric Vishria, a partner at Benchmark who sits on Cerebras’s board, said the outcome was notable regardless of the exact valuation. “It’s a big outcome. Whether it’s $100 billion or $50 billion, it’s very rare to have companies go public period when you’re an early-stage venture investor.”

The IPO mints two billionaires: Feldman, whose stake is now worth roughly $12 billion, and Lie, whose holdings are valued at about $7.5 billion, based on the closing price. Benchmark, an early backer, holds a position worth several billion dollars.

The debut lands in a market hungry for large technology listings. US exchange-traded funds tracking the semiconductor sector have drawn roughly $18 billion in net inflows so far this year, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is up 34 per cent in 2026. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley led the underwriting syndicate, with the order book covered more than 20 times, according to a person familiar with the matter.

What happens next

Bankers and investors expect the strong debut to accelerate a pipeline of AI infrastructure listings including Groq, SambaNova, and CoreWeave.

Cerebras has signalled that the capital raise will fund an expansion of its manufacturing capacity and a push into inference — running already-trained AI models — which the company estimates could eclipse the training segment within five years. A move into inference would pit Cerebras more directly against Nvidia.

Cerebras chips are subject to the same export controls that restrict sales of advanced semiconductors to China, and the company has positioned itself as a domestically manufactured alternative to foreign suppliers.

Shares begin regular trading on Thursday under the ticker CBRS.