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Cerebras (CBRS) came into Nasdaq on Thursday with a huge first trade, opening at $350 after selling IPO shares at $185 each and clearing $100 billion market cap right away.
The CBRS stock later ran past $385, then cooled in afternoon trading to around $310, leaving the company valued near $95 billion after the early rush faded.
Cerebras sold 30 million shares on Wednesday night and raised $5.55 billion from the listing. That made it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber Technologies (UBER) went public in 2019. The banks handling the deal can buy another 4.5 million shares if they use their full option. That would push the total raise to about $6.38 billion.
The debut also arrived after a weak stretch for tech IPOs that started after the 2022 market slump, when inflation jumped and public investors became a lot more careful with expensive growth names.
Cerebras enters Nasdaq while AI chip demand pulls semiconductor stocks higher
AI spending has pushed a wide part of the chip sector higher this year, with investors still chasing companies tied to data centers, model training, and inference.
Intel (INTC), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Micron Technology (MU) have each gained more than 100% in 2026.
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) has also rallied by 58% this year, showing how broad the trade has become.
An increase in the number of artificial intelligence (AI) agents explains why chips remain in such high demand. The latter requires less human intervention to perform some operations, leading to a higher need for computational power.
Nvidia has greatly benefited from it with its GPUs powering many AI-related applications. It is also a positive development for ordinary CPUs as data centers require various hardware to provide necessary services.
This IPO makes Cerebras the biggest pure play on artificial intelligence to list on the stock exchange. Also, it marks Wall Street’s return to technology after several months without tech listings.
The company may list its shares ahead of other AI deals, including SpaceX’s listing, which took place after the company partnered with xAI in February. OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to list this year as well if investors continue buying AI companies.
From the standpoint of fundamentals, Cerebras’ business performed well even before listing. For instance, the company’s sales soared 76% to $510 million.
As a result, the firm reported net income of $88 million despite recording a loss of $481.6 million during the previous fiscal year. The shift in Cerebras performance will give the IPO a cleaner background.
Cerebras builds its Nvidia challenge around its own wafer-scale chips
The primary hardware competition comes from Nvidia (NVDA), which currently holds the status of the most valued firm globally. Cerebras argues that its systems would be able to outperform the Nvidia GPUs both in speed and cost, since their architecture differs.
They operate Wafer-Scale Engine chips, which are not Nvidia GPUs. It is important to mention that the said Wafer-Scale Engine chip lies at the very core of their architecture.
In other words, by selling the CS-3 system, Cerebras targets Nvidia’s DGX B200 and Blackwell platforms. As such, the key point here is that the core computing capability does not rely on Nvidia.
To put it differently, their systems do not use Nvidia GPUs or CUDA as their key computing power. This follows from the fact that CUDA is proprietary technology developed by Nvidia, and therefore Cerebras cannot leverage it in their products.
However, it is possible that every particular customer would build their AI architecture in a way that incorporates some components of Nvidia GPU or AI technology into their system. Specifically, they may train some AI model on Nvidia’s systems and perform inference on Cerebras’.
Moreover, they may use CUDA-based software and port it to their solutions. In short, although the core product does not incorporate Nvidia GPUs or CUDA, clients may still incorporate them somehow into their workflow.
The process of going public was anything but easy. First, the company announced its IPO in September 2024. However, around a year later, Cerebras cancelled the plans for IPO due to the risk of customer concentration issues associated with G42, an MS-led UAE AI firm.
Later on, Cerebras filed for another IPO with updated numbers in April. According to their filing, G42 only generated 24% of revenues last year, while previously contributing 85% in 2024. At the same time, a university affiliated with the UAE government contributed up to 62%.
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