Cerebras prices U.S. IPO at $185, raises $5.55 billion

Cerebras Systems priced its U.S. initial public offering at $185 a share, above the top of its marketed range, and raised $5.55 billion on 30 million shares. The deal gave the AI-chip maker a fully diluted valuation of $56.43 billion and drew demand for more than 20 times the shares available, making it the largest U.S. stock market debut so far this year.

The appetite for the offering says as much about the market as it does about Cerebras. Investors have kept piling into AI-linked names even as volatility has hit other corners of the market, and the deal lands in the middle of a broader rebound in U.S. IPOs. It also shows how the AI boom has pushed beyond software and cloud services into the specialized chips and data-center computing systems needed to train and run large models. In that sense, the question is not only whether Cerebras deserves a blockbuster valuation, but whether public markets are rewarding real competitive strength or simply chasing the next large-scale AI bet.

Cerebras filed its public S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 17, amended it on May 4 and again on May 11, and is set to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker CBRS. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS Investment Bank led the offering, joined by Mizuho, TD Cowen, Needham & Company, Craig-Hallum, Wedbush Securities, Rosenblatt, Academy Securities, Credit Agricole CIB, MUFG and First Citizens Capital Securities. Underwriters also have the option to buy an additional 4.5 million shares.

The listing comes after years of scrutiny over Cerebras’ dependence on a small number of customers tied to the United Arab Emirates. In its refreshed prospectus, the company said 24% of 2025 revenue came from G42, down from 85% in 2024, while Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence accounted for 62% of revenue last year. Cerebras also reported $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations as of Dec. 31, though only 15% is expected to be recognized in 2026 and 2027, underscoring both the scale of its backlog and the concentration risk that has shadowed the business.

Founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie and Jean-Philippe Fricker, Cerebras introduced its WSE-1 chip and CS-1 system in 2019. It later joined with G42 on Condor Galaxy in July 2023, a planned nine-supercomputer network aimed at 36 exaFLOPs of AI training capacity. The company first tried to go public in 2024, withdrew that plan in 2025 amid foreign-ownership concerns, and returned this year with a much richer price tag. At the IPO price, Feldman’s stake was worth about $1.9 billion, a sign of how quickly the public market is now assigning value to the hardware layer of the AI economy.