Cerebras Systems raised $5.5 billion in its IPO on Thursday, with shares priced at $185 on Wednesday evening. This is well above the range ($115-$125, later raised to $150-$160) despite increasing the offering size to 30 million shares.
It then more than doubled (a 108% increase) to public trading at $385 as retail investors drove the price up. Stocks soon cooled off a bit. It is currently trading heavily above $330 at midday.
Despite its IPO price of $185, the company entered first trading at a fully diluted valuation of $56.4 billion (taking all shares into account). Co-founder CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake is worth nearly $1.9 billion at $185 per share, while co-founder CTO Sean Lie’s stake is worth about $1 billion.
And obviously, if the $300 price above holds, the company and its founder will end the day worth a lot more than that.
Just a year ago, it seemed like this day would never happen for Cerebra. Nvidia’s rival, which designed giant chips built for AI from scratch, was the first to file for an initial public offering in 2024. But the IPO was bogged down by endless reviews by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) amid concerns about a large investment from Abu Dhabi-based Group 42. Investors were also cool about its financials. Group 42 accounted for almost all of Cerebras’ profits. So the IPO plans were put on hold.
IPO ambitions returned in earnest in April, when the company was able to report double revenue for 2025 to $510 million (up 76% year-over-year) and from a handful of customers. It also reported a significant increase in net income to $237.8 million, compared to a loss of nearly $500 million the previous year.
Investors started drooling.
Cerebras has now emerged as a major contender for supplying chips for inference – the continuous computational processing required for models to respond to prompts – and counts OpenAI (Complex Circular Transactions), G42, Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Amazon Web Services among its customers.
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