Cerebras CEO says AI chip demand is ‘not speculative’ as shares double in blockbuster IPO debut

Cerebras Systems Inc. shares surged more than 100% above their IPO price when trading opened Thursday, in a blockbuster debut that underscored investors’ intense appetite for AI infrastructure companies. The company priced its initial public offering at $185 a share Wednesday night—above an already elevated expected range—raising roughly $5.55 billion. The AI chipmaker sold 30 million shares, with underwriters holding an option to purchase an additional 4.5 million shares, according to the company. Founded in 2016, the company is a San Francisco-based chipmaker that designs processors specifically for AI workloads. Its flagship product, the Wafer Scale Engine 3, is built on a single silicon wafer rather than the smaller chips stitched together in Nvidia’s GPUs—a design the company says delivers speed and cost advantages for AI inference. It’s a competitor for both Nvidia and AMD. Cerebras is being watched as a bellwether for the AI-infrastructure investment cycle, as tech companies race to secure the hardware and compute capacity needed to train and run AI systems. The offering is one of the largest U.S. tech IPOs in years and is seen as a wider stress test for a wave of AI listings Wall Street is bracing for later in the year. In an interview with Fortune, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said that the demand for AI chips like those from Cerebras, which are used specifically for inference, or to actually run frontier AI models once they are trained, is not speculative. “We’re not in a situation like [the movie] Field of Dreams, where ‘if you build it, they will come,'” he said. “If you ask Anthropic, if you ask OpenAI, they have vastly more demand for their offering than they have compute to make it. And that is a profoundly different scenario.” Only Uber’s 2019 debut, which raised roughly $8 billion, and Rivian’s $12 billion offering in 2021 come in above it among recent high-profile listings. Cerebras first f