Cerebras stock nearly doubles on day one as AI chipmaker hits $100 billion — what it means for AI infrastructure

Cerebras Systems, the Silicon Valley chipmaker that built the world's largest commercial AI processor, erupted onto the Nasdaq on Wednesday, opening at $350 per share — nearly double its $185 IPO price — and rocketing past a $100 billion market capitalization in its first hours of trading. The debut instantly crowned Cerebras as one of the most valuable semiconductor companies on Earth and validated a decade-long bet that the AI industry would eventually demand a fundamentally different kind of chip.The company sold 30 million shares at $185 apiece, raising $5.55 billion in what Bloomberg reported as the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber went public in 2019. The final pricing shattered expectations: Cerebras initially marketed shares at $115 to $125, then raised the range to $150 to $160 as investor demand surged, before ultimately pricing above even that elevated band."This is just a new beginning," Julie Choi, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Cerebras, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview on the morning of the IPO. The company, she said, plans to pour its fresh capital into expanding the cloud infrastructure that has become the centerpiece of its growth strategy. "With this new capital, we're going to fill more data halls with Cerebras systems to power the world's fastest inference."The IPO caps one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds in recent tech history. Cerebras first filed to go public in September 2024 but withdrew the effort more than a year later amid intense scrutiny over its near-total revenue dependence on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates. The company refiled in April 2026 with a radically different business profile: new partnerships with OpenAI and Amazon Web Services, a fast-growing cloud inference service, and a revenue base that had climbed 76% to $510 million in 2025.How a dinner-plate-sized chip became the foundation of a $100 billion companyTo understand the frenzy, you have to understa