Cerebras Surges 68% in Nasdaq Debut After $5.55 Billion IPO

Cerebras Systems (CBRS) surged 68 per cent in its Nasdaq debut on May 14, closing at $311.07 after pricing its initial public offering at $185 a share. The $5.55 billion raise from 30 million shares marked the largest US technology IPO since Uber’s 2019 listing.

The final price landed well above the already elevated range of $150 to $160, itself raised twice during book-building. At the close, Cerebras commanded a market capitalization of roughly $95 billion, making it one of the most valuable semiconductor companies ever to go public.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company builds on the wafer-scale engine, a chip architecture that replaces racks of conventional processors with a single slab of silicon the size of a dinner plate. Its CS-3 system packs 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI cores onto a 46,225-square-millimeter die. TIME magazine named it one of the Best Inventions of 2024.

Cerebras enters the public markets with sharply improving financials. Revenue hit $510 million in 2025, a 76 per cent jump from $290 million. Net income swung to $237.8 million from a loss of $481.6 million, according to regulatory filings. The company had originally filed for an IPO in early 2025 but pulled the paperwork amid market turbulence, before refiling in April.

That growth carries a concentration risk. Cerebras disclosed that 86 per cent of 2025 revenue came from a single customer: G42. The Abu Dhabi-based AI holding company and its Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI affiliate accounted for nearly all sales. Chief executive Andrew Feldman did not shy away from it. “There’s some whales out there, there’s some really big customers,” he told CNBC. “That is one of the characteristics of this market.”

The listing places Cerebras in direct competition with Nvidia (NVDA), whose GPUs dominate AI computing. Nvidia traded at $235.74 the same day, a market capitalization above $5.7 trillion. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the second major AI-accelerator player, closed at $449.70 for a valuation of about $733 billion.

Cerebras has taken steps to broaden its revenue base. It signed a deal with OpenAI valued at more than $20 billion for computing capacity through 2028, Reuters reported. The agreement covers 750 megawatts of power, with an option for an additional 1.25 gigawatts. Cerebras has also partnered with Amazon Web Services to offer its systems through the cloud provider.

A successful debut of this size may unlock the IPO pipeline for other AI-hardware names. The technology listing market had been largely dormant for months. Cerebras revived its filing in April after scrapping an earlier attempt in 2025. Whether the warm reception extends to other chip designers approaching a public listing will be the next test.

“We’re training models together” on English-Arabic systems with the Abu Dhabi university, Feldman said. The remark signaled that Cerebras views its largest customer relationships as multi-year research partnerships, not transactional hardware sales.