Cerebras Biggest IPO of the Year. If You Buy CBRS Stock Now, Commit to Consistency Forward.
The biggest initial public offering of 2026 – so far – went better than many expected. Cerebras Systems (CBRS), a maker of plate-sized semiconductor chips that can train and run artificial intelligence models and systems, went public on May 14.
Cerebras had set an IPO price of $185, but the stock opened at a high of $350 and hit an intraday high of $385 before closing the day at $311, valuing the company at nearly $67 billion.
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Cerebras is seen as a competitor to Nvidia (NVDA), which makes the most popular AI chips and whose valuation has reached $5 trillion, making it the largest publicly traded company in the world. But with Cerebras promoting chips that are 58% larger and 15% faster than competitors, investors are lining up to get involved.
Here’s a closer look at Cerebras as a challenger to Nvidia’s dominance.
About Cerebras Systems Stock
Based in Sunnyvale, California, Cerebras Systems began in 2015 to bring wafer-scale computing to the market. It introduced the first generation chip, WSE-1, in 2019 and introduced the second generation chips in 2021. The third-generation chips for the current WSE-3 and its CS-3 computer system went live in 2024. WSE-3 contains over 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI-optimized cores.
Notably, it raised more than $2.5 billion in venture capital before going public.
Revenue in 2025 was $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 more transistors.
Cerebras has a partnership with Amazon (AMZN), where it announced plans to collaborate on applications using AWS Trainium chips and Cerebras’s CS-3 accelerator with Amazon Bedrock. The latter is available on AWS for developers to build, scale, and deploy productive 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 lease 750 megawatts of capacity from Cerebras until 2028.
The company initially 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 shares available, Bloomberg report.
Should You Invest In Cerebras Stock?
On the other hand, infrastructure AI seems to be a pretty safe bet right now. Major hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft (MSFT), Meta Platforms (META), and Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) have pledged to spend up to $700 billion this year on building AI, with much of that to be done on semiconductors. That’s why companies like Nvidia have made so much profit, as well as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO).
However, the company has few customers. A research lab in the United Arab Emirates accounted for 62% of revenue last year, while G42, a UAE-backed AI company, accounted for 24% of revenue. Its $24.6 billion backlog at the end of 2025 was due to its OpenAI contract. Now that it has gone public, Cerebras will need to develop additional commercial contracts, which means moving them away from existing partnerships.
And remember, IPOs are notoriously volatile due to limited public history or analyst coverage. Media hype can significantly affect IPO performance. So if you are going to invest, you should expect many hills and valleys in the stock price.
Either way, the Cerebras IPO is huge in 2026, but it could be eclipsed soon. SpaceX has valued itself at more than $1 trillion and is expected to file publicly this summer. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic will also be major IPOs if those companies go public.
At the date of publication, Patrick Sanders held a position at: NVDA. All information and data in this article is for informational purposes only. This article was originally published on Barchart.com
