Cerebras $CBRS Surges 70% on IPO Day, Hits $95B Market Cap; SpaceX, OpenAI Hype Ignites

Cerebras Systems made a stunning Wall Street debut on May 15, with shares surging nearly 70% on its first trading day to close with a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. Only two companies in U.S. IPO history — Alibaba and Saudi Aramco — have closed their debut day above $100 billion in market value, making Cerebras's opening one of the most consequential tech listings in years.

The company's core product, the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), uses a full semiconductor wafer as a single processing unit, delivering claimed 10x speed advantages over Nvidia's H100/H200 GPUs for certain large language model inference workloads. As inference costs emerge as the AI industry's next bottleneck, demand for alternatives to Nvidia's GPU stack has accelerated. CNBC reported that Cerebras's chips compete directly on price-performance for AI inference at scale, a market Nvidia currently controls with roughly 80% share.

Beyond the chip competition narrative, the IPO served as a barometer for the broader AI investment supercycle. Investment bankers at several major firms told CNBC that Cerebras's reception has re-energized internal discussions about IPO timelines for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — three of the most valuable private companies in the world. Anthropic is reportedly tracking more than $15 billion in annualized revenue, setting up a potential multi-hundred-billion-dollar valuation upon listing.

The IPO also underscored a market dynamic that has disadvantaged non-AI companies: investor attention and capital are concentrating intensely in AI plays, leaving traditional technology names to compete for a shrinking share of new money.

Watch for: Cerebras's cloud integration partnerships with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. A confirmed hyperscaler deal would validate the go-to-market thesis and likely serve as the next material re-rating event for the stock.

Not investment advice. Verify all figures with primary sources before acting.