A sign for Cerebras Systems Inc. during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Market site on Thursday, May 14, 2026 in New York, USA.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
cerebral systemShares were volatile in early trading Friday after the company completed the largest initial public offering for a U.S. tech company in years.
The semiconductor company initially sold shares at $185 at the start of trading on the New York-based Nasdaq Stock Exchange and closed at $331.07 per share. Cerebra’s stock price soared 68% by the closing bell, giving it a market capitalization of about $95 billion.
The company sold 30 million shares on Thursday, raising $5.55 billion, making it the largest IPO for a tech company since Uber’s debut in 2019.
Cerebras initially rose about 6% in premarket trading on Friday, but has now fallen 2.6%, including gains from the previous session.
Cerebras is an AI hardware company that sells supersized computer chips and AI systems designed to train and run AI models faster than traditional GPUs. The company sells AI infrastructure, but its specialty is inference, where models respond to and interact directly with users.
Its flagship product is the Wafer Scale Engine 3, a giant processor built from an entire silicon wafer rather than many tiny chips. Cerebras claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.
Some analysts are skeptical about the company’s long-term viability and how applicable its wafer-scale AI technology will be. Analysts at investment banking group Davidson on Wednesday described the product as “niche.”
“The Cerebras IPO may be well-received, but after reading S1 and watching the roadshow, we don’t think there’s much excitement,” Davidson analysts said ahead of the company’s market debut.
They added that while the technology is impressive, the wafer is still in its “early stages of maturity” and while it may be able to achieve high speeds in some applications, it is less flexible than existing AI chip systems.
The IPO debut made the company’s executives billionaires, with CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lee owning $3.2 billion and $1.7 billion worth of stock, respectively.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Feldman said the company has matured enough to have “access to the public markets,” adding, “We have tremendous growth opportunities, and this was the right way to fund our growth.”
