Even though Cerebra Systems raised $5.5 billion in Thursday’s IPO and increased its offering to 30 million shares, its stock price on Wednesday night was set at $185, well above that range ($115 to $125, later raised to $150 to $160).
Retail investors then drove up the price, more than doubling the price (up 108%) to open for public trading at $385. The stock price cooled only slightly shortly thereafter. It is currently trading significantly above $330 during the day.
Even with an IPO price of $185, the company opened its first day of trading at a fully diluted valuation of $56.4 billion (equivalent to all shares). Co-founder CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake at $185 per share is worth nearly $1.9 billion, and co-founder CTO Sean Lee’s stake is worth about $1 billion.
And clearly, if the price stays above $300, the company and its founders will end the day worth much more than that.
A year ago, it seemed like this day would never happen for Cerebras. Nvidia’s competitor, which designed a giant chip specifically for AI from scratch, had filed to go public for the first time in 2024. However, the IPO was stalled by an endless review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) due to concerns about the huge investment from Abu Dhabi-based Group 42. Investors were also calm about the company’s financial situation. Group 42 accounted for almost all of Cerebras’ revenue. As such, those IPO plans were shelved.
IPO ambitions returned in earnest in April, when the company was able to nearly double its revenue to $510 million in 2025 (up 76% year over year) and report revenue from a handful of customers. It also reported a significant increase in profits, with net income of $237.8 million, compared to a loss of nearly $500 million a year earlier.
Investors started salivating.
Cerebras has now emerged as a leading candidate to supply chips for inference (the continuous computational processing required for models to answer prompts), and counts OpenAI (with which it has a complex circular relationship), G42, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, and Amazon Web Services among its customers.
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