There was a moment in 2017 when OpenAI almost merged with Cerebras. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's co‑founder and president, wrote in an internal email at the time: "Exclusive access to Cerebras hardware would give OpenAI an overwhelming hardware advantage over Google." The merger did not happen. Nine years later, OpenAI signed a $20 billion multi‑year deal for Cerebras computing capacity, and on Thursday May 14, 2026, Cerebras went public on Nasdaq under the ticker CBRS, opening at $350, more than 90 percent above its IPO price of $185, peaking intraday at $385, and closing at $311.07, up 68 percent on its first day of trading.

The closing market capitalization was approximately $95 billion. The IPO raised $5.55 billion — the largest US technology IPO since Uber raised $8 billion in 2019. If underwriters exercise their option to purchase 4.5 million additional shares, total proceeds could reach $6.38 billion.

Andrew Feldman, Cerebras's co‑founder and CEO, became a billionaire with a stake worth $3.2 billion at Thursday's closing price. CTO Sean Lie holds a stake worth $1.7 billion. Benchmark, which co‑led Cerebras's Series A funding round in 2016 at a valuation of a few hundred million dollars, owns shares now worth $5.5 billion. Foundation Capital, another early backer from that same round, holds a stake valued at $4.8 billion. These are the returns that early‑stage venture capital is supposed to generate, and they have been years in coming after an extended drought in major technology IPOs.

The road to Thursday was not smooth. Cerebras originally filed to go public in September 2024, only to withdraw its submission more than a year later after its prospectus attracted regulatory scrutiny due to the company's heavy reliance on a single customer: G42, the Abu Dhabi‑based AI company backed by Microsoft. In the original S‑1, G42 represented 87 percent of Cerebras's revenue in the first half of 2024. The combination of customer concentration and national security concerns about a Chinese‑connected entity owning a significant stake in G42 created complications that delayed the IPO by eighteen months.

When Cerebras refiled in April 2026, the story had changed materially. G42's share of 2025 revenue had fallen to 24 percent. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE had become the largest customer at 62 percent of revenue. And most importantly, OpenAI had signed the $20 billion multi‑year compute agreement that replaced speculative customer diversification with contracted backlog.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources, that Arm and SoftBank had both attempted to acquire Cerebras weeks before the IPO. Cerebras declined to comment on the report. The fact that the two largest semiconductor IP licensing and investment entities in the world tried to buy the company before it went public, and that Cerebras chose public markets instead, is the sharpest available signal of what Andrew Feldman believes the company is worth independently.

The fully diluted valuation at the IPO price of $185 per share was $56.4 billion. At Thursday's close of $311.07, the fully diluted valuation was approximately $86 to $95 billion depending on whether you use outstanding shares or the fully diluted count including restricted shares, options, and warrants. At 187 times trailing twelve‑month revenue of $510 million, the stock is priced for aggressive growth assumptions. Revenue grew 76 percent in 2025; maintaining even half that growth rate would compress the multiple significantly within twelve months.

Cerebras's first‑day pop is also a signal for the IPO pipeline behind it. There were only 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years earlier. SpaceX, expected to go public later this year, is targeting a valuation that could exceed $1.75 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are both in various stages of IPO preparation for 2026 or 2027. Cerebras's $95 billion market cap on day one gives their investment bankers a much more optimistic set of data points for pricing conversations.

More at cerebras.net | Stock: CBRS on Nasdaq