The biggest initial public offering of 2026 – so far – went better than many expected. Cerebras Systems (CBRS), a maker of dinner plate-sized semiconductor chips capable of training and running artificial intelligence models and programs, went public on May 14.
Cerebras had set an IPO price of $185, but the stock opened at a whopping $350 and reached an intraday high of $385 before closing the day at $311, putting the company’s value at about $67 billion.
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Cerebras is seen as a competitor with Nvidia (NVDA), which makes the most popular AI chips and whose valuation has topped $5 trillion, making it the biggest publicly traded company in the world. But with Cerebras promoting chips that it claims are 58% larger and capable of operating 15% faster than competitors, investors are lining up to take their stake.
Here’s a closer look at Cerebras as a challenger to Nvidia’s dominance.
About Cerebras Systems Stock
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Cerebras Systems got its start in 2015 to bring wafer-scale computing to market. It launched its first-generation chip, the WSE-1, in 2019 and introduced second-generation chips in 2021. The current third-generation WSE-3 chips and its CS-3 computer system went live in 2024. The WSE-3 contains more than 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI-optimized cores.
Notably, it raised more than $2.5 billion in venture capital before going public.
Revenues in 2025 were $510 million, up from $290 million in 2024. The company reported a profit of $238 million last year after posting a loss of $482 million in 2024.
In a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, Cerebras says its chips use an entire 12-inch silicon wafer that is 30 times the size of Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 package and has 19 times as many transistors.
Cerebras has a partnership with Amazon (AMZN), in which it announced plans to collaborate on systems using AWS Trainium chips and Cerebras’s CS-3 accelerator through Amazon Bedrock. The latter is available on AWS for developers to build, scale, and deploy generative AI applications.
Also, CBRS is partnering with OpenAI, which earlier this year launched its first AI model using Cerebras chips. OpenAI is spending up to $20 billion to rent 750 megawatts of capacity from Cerebras through 2028.
The company first marketed 30 million shares of Cerebras stock at a price between $150 and $160, but raised it because demand was more than 20 times the number of available shares, Bloomberg reported.
Should You Invest In Cerebras Stock?
On the one hand, AI infrastructure seems to be the safest play right now. The major hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft (MSFT), Meta Platforms (META), and Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) have pledged to spend up to $700 billion this year on the AI build-out, with a lot of that going for semiconductors. That’s why companies like Nvidia have been so profitable, as well as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO).
www.barchart.comHowever, the company has few customers. A research lab in the United Arab Emirates accounted for 62% of its revenue last year, and G42, an AI company backed by the UAE, accounted for 24% of revenue. Its backlog of $24.6 billion as of the end of 2025 was mostly due to its OpenAI contract. Now that it's gone public, Cerebras will need to develop more commercial contracts, which means pulling them away from already-established relationships.
And remember, IPOs are notoriously volatile because of limited public history or analyst coverage. Media hype can sway the performance of an IPO dramatically. So if you’re going to invest, you have to expect a lot of hills and valleys in the stock price.
Either way, the Cerebras IPO is the biggest of 2026, but it could be eclipsed soon. SpaceX valued itself at more than $1 trillion and is expected to file to go public this summer. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic would also be major IPOs should those companies go public.
On the date of publication, Patrick Sanders had a position in: NVDA . All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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