The almost insatiable investor demand for companies leveraged to the artificial intelligence (AI) boom was starkly demonstrated when Cerebras Systems shares more than doubled when they started trading on Thursday.
The Cerebras (NASDAQ: CBRS) stock price surged to a high of US$386.34 from the initial public offer (IPO) level of $185 before settling back to close at $311.07, up 68% on the day and capitalising the American AI chipmaker at $95 billion (A$131 billion).
Shares in the California-based company, which raised $5.55 billion in the largest IPO of 2026, had opened at $350 and traded between $300 and $386.34 on the Nasdaq exchange.
“In Silicon Valley we understand just how big AI will be, and what that means,” Chief Executive Officer Andrew Feldman was quoted as saying in this Reuters story.
The frenzy over AI stocks has been likened to a gold rush, with the Dow Jones U.S. Semiconductors Index, which tracks chip heavyweights such as Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), rising 107% over the past year.
It also sets the scene for AI-related IPOs by companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which are thinking about listing.
Investor interest in Cerebras’ IPO was overwhelming, with orders exceeding available shares by more than 20 times, prompting the company to raise the size and price range of the offering earlier this week.
The company filed to go public in September 2024 but withdrew its submission in 2025 after its prospectus was filed because it relied heavily on one customer, United Arab Emirates-based G42.
Cerebras refiled again in April, issuing a new prospectus showing revenue from G42 had fallen to 24% in 2025 from 85% in 2024.
Formed in 2015, Cerebras is challenging the dominance of the world’s largest company, Nvidia, in the market for chips used in data centres with its dinner plate-sized processors designed to speed up processing.
The company believes its chips are well-suited for ‘inference’ whereby models trained on large amounts of data generate responses to inputs like prompts.
