Cerebras closes at $70B on Nasdaq debut as Abu Dhabi-fuelled AI chipmaker prices year's biggest IPO

Cerebras Systems shares closed at $311 on their first day of trading on Thursday, up 68% from the $185 IPO price and briefly touching $385 before trading was halted for volatility, giving the AI chipmaker a market capitalisation of nearly $70 billion.

The company raised $5.5 billion in the biggest IPO of the year, according to the Financial Times, after bankers raised the expected offering price several times to meet demand.

The valuation leap over the course of the last twelve months is significant. Cerebras was valued at $8.1 billion in its Series G less than a year ago and $23 billion in its Series H in February. At $70 billion it sits alongside General Motors and NXP, and the market response will sharpen expectations for the expected IPOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX later this year.

As FWDstart reported last month, the IPO filing revealed that 86% of Cerebras's 2025 revenue still came from two Abu Dhabi entities, G42 (24%) and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (62%), while US-billed revenue actually declined 34% year-on-year.

The FT noted that the company's deals with OpenAI ($20 billion multi-year agreement), AWS, Meta, Mistral, Cognition and Windsurf "should help to reduce its reliance" on the UAE customers. CEO Andrew Feldman played down the concentration risk, telling the FT that the AWS partnership alone opens the door to thousands of corporate clients.

Cerebras was founded more than a decade ago by Feldman and CTO Sean Lie. Its wafer-scale engine uses entire sheets of silicon to produce a chip 58 times larger than Nvidia's GPUs, eliminating the need to link smaller chips together and offering speed advantages for the inference workloads that have become critical as AI tools scale to millions of users.

The IPO landed on a day when both Nvidia and Broadcom hit all-time highs, valued at $5.7 trillion and $2.1 trillion respectively.