The wave of anticipated initial public offerings of artificial intelligence companies started with a bang on Thursday.
Cerebras, the Silicon Valley AI chipmaker, started trading its stock on the stock market at $350, a much higher IPO price $185it rose 68 percent to $311.07 before closing the day. This valued the company at $67 billion. In the week before its market debut, Cerebras raised its offering price twice from an initial $115 and increased the number of shares it made available to investors, raising at least $5.6 billion for itself.
That made Cerebras the biggest public offering so far this year and the biggest tech debut in the world since 2019, said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, which tracks the IPO.
“The AIIPO boom is really starting to happen now,” he said.
Cerebras heralds a number of potential “mega IPOs” from AI-related firms, including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker that owns his AI initiatives, has valued itself at more than $1 trillion and could go public as early as next month. Investors are also eagerly anticipating OpenAI and Anthropic, which have developed basic AI models and tools such as chatbots. All of them could be among the biggest IPOs to date.
These companies would go public amid the artificial intelligence craze that is transforming everything from software coding to geopolitics. Tech giants including Google, Meta and Microsoft are pouring billions into building data centers to support AI development, and some are partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic to win the tech competition.
The mania has catapulted Nvidia, the largest maker of AI chips, to the position of the world’s most valuable public company. Cerebras is among the companies trying to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.
Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, makes advanced computer chips that can be used to train artificial intelligence models. It is particularly known for what it claims is the largest computer chip ever made — as big as a dinner plate, about 100 times the size of a typical chip — that can be used in data centers to accelerate AI advances.
Derived from the Latin word for “brain,” Cerebras 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 start-up 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 in the private markets at $23 billion.
When Cerebras started selling its product seven years ago, “nobody was interested and the market wasn’t ready for it,” Mr. Feldman, 56, Cerebras’ chief executive, said in an interview.
“The tipping point was that in the first half of 2025 the AI models were smart enough to be useful,” he said, adding that last year “our business exploded.” The IPO made Mr. Feldman a billionaire.
Cerebras previously filed to go public in 2024. At the time, it relied heavily on a single customer who was also an investor — G42, an AI company backed by the United Arab Emirates. G42 accounted for 87 percent of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024, according to the company’s filing.
Cerebras said at the time that it notified the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of the sale of G42 shares so that the committee could review the partnership for national security risks. The company later announced that CFIUS had approved the sale, but withdrew its IPO plans without explanation.
Now Cerebras is driving demand from tech firms that want computing power for AI development. It has struck deals with Amazon and OpenAI, though it still relies mostly on a handful of large customers. G42 accounted for 24 percent of Cerebras’ revenue last year, and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a research lab in the United Arab Emirates, accounted for 62 percent, according to a company filing.
In total, Cerebras generated $510 million in revenue last year, up from $290 million in 2024, according to its filing. Profit was $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 AI systems. Both companies have denied the claims.)
Cade Metz contributed reporting.
