Cerebras as the largest tech IPO of the year so far. Prices reached double the value

On May 14, 2026, the technology company Cerebras listed its shares (CBRS) on the US Nasdaq exchange for the first time and immediately brought huge excitement, opening at 350 USD. This was a significant upward move, as their value before market open was 185 USD. During the day, they were able to add further gains, reaching a high of 385 USD, and closed the day at 311 USD. The decline could be attributed to investors taking profits. Thursday’s trading therefore brought a total valuation of 95 billion USD. This performance followed Wednesday’s brief trading session, when shares worth 5.5 billion USD were sold, making it the largest IPO since 2019, when Uber went public. As of May 19, 2026, the share price was around 320 USD, representing more than a 70% increase compared to its listing price.*

Stock performance of Cerebras since its Nasdaq listing on May 14, 2026. Source: Google Finance*

A difficult IPO journey

The market showed strong interest in the company, a direct competitor of Nvidia, already in the first hours. However, Cerebras’ IPO, which focuses on developing high-performance chips and systems designed for training large AI models, was not straightforward. After a year of attempting to go public, these plans collapsed in 2025 because a review of the filing revealed that 85% of revenue came from a single partnership with Saudi G42. Later, according to CNBC, they managed to reduce this share to just over 20%, and therefore refiled in April. Regarding financial results, 2025 brought a 76% increase in revenue to 510 million USD with a profit of 88 million, reducing the previous year’s loss of 481 million USD. The company also added partnerships with Amazon and OpenAI related to cloud solutions to its portfolio of alternatives to traditional GPU systems this year.

Will Cerebras impact other companies?

The ten-year-old company entered a market with extremely high demand and limited supply, and analysts consider it a disruptive factor in AI infrastructure, which contributed to strong interest in its IPO. According to experts, this may influence high expectations for other companies planning to go public. This could potentially apply to Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Moreover, these are more well-known companies than Cerebras was. It is also becoming clear that investors will increasingly focus on the sustainability of business models. IPO volatility is standard, but sentiment currently appears positive, and Cerebras has set a “benchmark” for future listings. The IPO market itself has been stagnating in recent years, although occasional interesting cases have appeared; interest in artificial intelligence could reignite this smoldering fire. However, this is a double-edged sword for other companies in different technology sectors, such as software-as-a-service, which are negatively affected by the rise of artificial intelligence.

*Past performance is not a guarantee of future results