A wave of expected initial public offerings from artificial intelligence companies began with a bang on Thursday.
Cerebras, a Silicon Valley AI chip maker, opened trading on the stock market at $350, up 89 percent from an IPO price of $185, valuing the company at $75 billion. In the week before its market debut, Cerebras had raised its offering price twice from a preliminary $115 and increased the number of shares it made available to investors, raising at least $5.6 billion for itself.
That made Cerebras the largest public offering so far this year and the biggest tech debut globally since 2019, said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, who tracks IPOs.
“The AIIPO boom is really starting to happen now,” he said.
Cerebras foreshadows a series of potential “mega IPOs” of AI-related companies, including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker, owner of his artificial intelligence initiatives, has been valued at more than $1 trillion and could go public next month. Investors are also eagerly awaiting OpenAI and Anthropic, which have developed fundamental AI models and tools such as chatbots. All of them could be among the largest IPOs to date.
These companies would hit the stock market amid a frenzy over AI, which is transforming everything from software coding to geopolitics. Tech giants like Google, Meta and Microsoft are investing billions in building data centers to drive AI development and some are working with OpenAI and Anthropic to win the tech competition.
The mania has catapulted Nvidia, the largest AI chip maker, to its position as the world’s most valuable public company. Cerebras is among the companies trying to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Cerebras makes advanced computing chips that can be used to train AI models. It is particularly known for what it claims is the largest computer chip ever built (as big as a dinner plate, about 100 times the size of a typical chip) that can be used in data centers to help accelerate AI progress.
“We are building the world’s fastest AI infrastructure,” the company said in its offering prospectus.
Cerebras, which is derived from the Latin word meaning “brain,” was founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, a semiconductor executive, and chip industry veterans Jean-Philippe Fricker, Michael James, Gary Lauterbach and Sean Lie. The startup began selling chips in 2019 and has raised more than $2.55 billion in venture capital from investors including Benchmark and Foundation Capital. The company was last valued on the private market at $23 billion.
Cerebras had previously filed to go public in 2024. At the time, it was largely dependent on a single client, which was also an investor: G42, a UAE-backed artificial intelligence company. G42 accounted for 87 percent of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024, according to company filings.
Cerebras said at the time that it had notified the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about the sale of shares to the G42 so that the committee could review the partnership for national security risks. The company later announced that CFIUS had cleared the sale, but canceled its IPO plans without explanation.
Now Cerebras is taking advantage of demand from technology companies that want computing power to develop AI. It has closed deals with Amazon and OpenAI, although it still relies primarily on a handful of major clients. G42 accounted for 24 percent of Cerebras’ revenue last year and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a research lab in the United Arab Emirates, accounted for 62 percent, according to company documents.
In total, Cerebras generated revenue of $510 million last year, up from $290 million in 2024, according to its disclosures. Profits were $238 million, compared to a loss of $482 million in 2024.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems. The two companies have denied the claims.)
Cade Metz contributed reports.
