Cerebras delivers monster IPO pop as traders clamor for fresh AI investment opportunities

This looks like one helluva IPO pop:

Cerebras Systems increased the expected price (and size) of its long-awaited initial public offering from a range of $115 to $125 at the start of the week all the way to $185, raising $5.5 billion.

But it opened at a whopping $350 in its Nasdaq debut, giving the company a market cap of at least $75 billion — and more than that on a fully diluted basis.

“Pretty good day, huh?” CEO Andrew Feldman said in an interview on Bloomberg TV, after being told the stock was indicated to open at $350.

The IPO was more than 25x oversubscribed, per Feldman. With investor appetite like this, it’s little wonder that SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are champing at the bit to join Cerebras in making this leap.

Cerebras, an AI chip designer, counts OpenAI and Amazon among its customers. Its offerings aim to provide more of a one-stop shop for AI compute rather than a highly specialized key ingredient in the data center stew. That is, its wafers are physically much larger than GPUs, which can unlock more efficiencies in moving around information.

“There’s just an extraordinary demand right now for fast inference,” added Feldman. “We’re the fastest, not by a little big, but by more than an order of magnitude — we’re 15x faster than the next nearest competitor.”