Cerebras pops 108% in biggest tech IPO since Uber then immediately drops

Cerebras Systems just completed the largest US tech IPO since Uber in 2019, raising $5.55 billion at $185 per share. Then the stock opened at $385. That is a 108% pop at the open. By close of day one on the Nasdaq, CBRS settled at $311, a 68% gain, giving the AI chipmaker a market cap just under $95 billion. Day two? Down 2.6% in early trading.

The IPO was priced well above its already-raised range of $150 to $160. The original range was $115 to $125. Demand was more than 20 times oversubscribed. Thirty million shares changed hands.

CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake hit $1.9 billion at the IPO price alone. Co-founder and CTO Sean Lie clocked in around $1 billion. At the $311 close, those numbers look substantially different.

A year ago this IPO looked dead. Cerebras first filed in 2024. A massive investment from Abu Dhabi-based Group 42 triggered an endless CFIUS review. Revenue concentration was another red flag: Group 42 accounted for almost all of it. The deal got shelved.

What changed? Cerebras reported $510 million in 2025 revenue, up 76% year over year, spread across multiple customers instead of one. Net income swung to $238 million after losing close to half a billion the prior year. Customers now include OpenAI, AWS, G42, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. The OpenAI relationship is reportedly a complicated circular deal.

Cerebras makes the Wafer-Scale Engine, a chip built from scratch for AI inference work. The pitch: faster inference, less power, versus Nvidia GPUs. Whether that pitch justifies a $95 billion valuation on $510 million of revenue is the question day two traders are already asking.

The IPO signals broader appetite for AI public offerings. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all reportedly preparing to go public. Nvidia itself rose 4% the same day, partly on news that its H200 chips may be cleared for sale in China following the Trump-Xi summit.

Underwriters: Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS Investment Bank. Ticker: CBRS on Nasdaq.