Cerebras stock falls after blockbuster IPO debut — here’s why
Sign of Cerebras Systems Inc. during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, USA, on Thursday, May 14, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cerebras Systems‘ shares fell 10% on Friday after the company completed the largest initial public offering by a US technology company in recent years.
The semiconductor company initially sold its shares at $185 when it began trading on the New York-based Nasdaq exchange, then closed at $331.07 per share. Cerebras’ shares rose 68% by the closing bell, reaching a market value of approximately $95 billion.
The firm raised $5.55 billion by selling 30 million shares on Thursday; This was the largest IPO for a tech company since Uber’s debut in 2019.
Cerebras is an AI hardware company that sells extremely large computer chips and AI systems designed to train and run AI models faster than traditional GPUs. While the company sells AI infrastructure, its specialty is inference, where models respond and interact directly with users.
Its flagship product is the Wafer Scale Engine 3, a massive processor made entirely of silicon wafers rather than lots of tiny chips. Cerebras claims that its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.
Some analysts are skeptical about the company’s long-term sustainability and how viable its wafer-scale AI technology is. Analysts from investment banking group Davidson on Wednesday described the product as “niche.”
“Cerebras’ IPO may have been well-received, but after reading the S1 and watching the roadshow, we won’t be too excited,” Davidson analysts said ahead of the company’s launch.
They added that although the technology is impressive, Wafer is still in the “early stages of maturity” and is less flexible than existing AI chip systems, although it can offer higher speeds in some applications.
The initial public offering made the company’s top executives billionaires; CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie own shares worth $3.2 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.
In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Feldman said the company is mature enough to “be able to access public markets” and that “we have tremendous opportunities for growth, and this is the right way to fund our growth.”
