Artificial intelligence chip company Cerebras Systems (CBRS) delivered a stunning debut on the Nasdaq exchange Thursday, with its share price soaring 68.2% above the offering price, marking the largest initial public offering of 2026 so far. However, this record could be surpassed if market expectations hold true regarding Elon Musk’s SpaceX potentially going public later this year.
Cerebras Systems set its IPO offering price at $185 per share, and the opening price reached $350, demonstrating robust market demand. The stock closed the day at $311.07, an increase of 68.2% from the offering price. The IPO involved 215.23 million shares outstanding, the company’s standard market capitalization at Thursday’s close was nearly $67 billion.
Cerebras Systems is a rapidly growing artificial intelligence chip manufacturer whose customers include ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The company is widely regarded as a competitor to AI chip leader Nvidia (NVDA) and indeed shows promise as a formidable challenger.
The company claims its wafer-scale AI chips are significantly faster at AI inference than all competitors’ chips, including Nvidia’s. Inference is the deployment phase of AI applications and is the second major step after training. In the long term, the global AI inference market is expected to grow faster than the AI training market, making this segment particularly attractive.
The company’s AI supercomputers, including the CS-2 and CS-3, are both powered by the WSE-3 AI processor. Customers can purchase these systems for their own facilities or rent computing power through the company’s pay-as-you-go cloud service.
According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cerebras’s revenue jumped from $24.6 million in 2022 to $78.7 million in 2023, and then to $290.3 million in 2024, representing a more than tenfold increase over three years. In 2025, revenue grew to $510 million, a year-over-year increase of 76%. This growth was driven primarily by a 69% increase in hardware business and a 99% increase in cloud and other services.
In comparison, Nvidia achieved revenue of $215.9 billion for the fiscal year ending January 25, 2026, representing a 65% year-over-year increase. Cerebras’s revenue growth rate is slightly higher than Nvidia’s, but achieving the same growth rate is far more difficult given that Nvidia’s scale is vastly larger than Cerebras’s—Nvidia’s revenue is 423 times that of Cerebras.
Although the operating loss in 2025 was $145.9 million, this was primarily due to high research and development expenses, which accounted for 48% of sales revenue that year. The positive net income in 2025 was mainly attributable to a substantial amount of “other net income” from items such as changes in fair value of forward contract liabilities and derecognition. On the positive side, Cerebras’s operating cash flow in 2025 was negative $10.1 million, indicating that the company is approaching operational break-even.
Based on Thursday’s closing price, Cerebras’s market capitalization of approximately $67 billion compares with the top five chip stocks as follows: Nvidia at approximately $5.7 trillion, TSMC at approximately $2.2 trillion, Broadcom at approximately $2.1 trillion, Micron Technology at approximately $87.5 billion, and AMD at approximately $73.3 billion.
Cerebras is expected to be considered for inclusion in the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq 100 Index. As of May 14, the smallest constituent by market cap in the S&P 500 was $4.7 billion, and the smallest in the Nasdaq 100 was $13 billion. Inclusion in major indices would have a positive impact on the stock, as mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that track these indices would need to purchase shares.
