Author: New Zhiyuan
This is insane! A chip the size of a dinner plate has created the largest tech IPO of 2026. Its 108% surge on the first day not only netted Ultraman nearly ten times his initial investment, but also fired the first shot in the over 3 trillion yuan IPO tsunami of the ASI era.
In 2026, the largest tech IPO in the United States was born!
Today, AI chip company Cerebras officially listed on Nasdaq, with its stock price surging 108% on its first day of trading.
The IPO was priced at $185 per share, but it jumped directly to $385 at the open and closed at $311, with a valuation that once reached $100 billion.
Cerebras sold 30 million shares in one go, raising $5.55 billion.
This is one of the largest IPOs by a US tech company since Uber went public in 2019, and its momentum is even stronger than that of Snowflake back then.
In the Nasdaq trading floor, Cerebras founder and CEO Andrew Feldman rang the opening bell.
Today, a large number of VC investors have become rich overnight. Altman, who held 89,000 shares, saw his investment increase tenfold to about $30 million.
Cerebra's stunning debut has ignited the AI IPO scene in 2026, with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic following suit.
The AI IPO boom is about to begin.
The largest AI IPO of 2026 saw its shares surge 108% on its first day of trading.
It must be said that a year ago, no one believed this day would come.
In 2015, semiconductor industry veteran Andrew Feldman joined forces with senior chip industry experts to found Cerebra.
When Feldman started selling chips in 2019, he said, "Nobody cares, the market isn't ready."
But it's no exaggeration to say that Cerebras's path to going public was a suspenseful drama.
In September 2024, Cerebras filed for an IPO for the first time.
As a result, it attracted the attention of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
The reason is that its major customer and investor, G42, is from Abu Dhabi, and at the time, G42 contributed 87% of Cerebras' revenue.
The national security review was repeatedly delayed, investor confidence collapsed, and the IPO plan was forced to be shelved.
One year later, the plot has completely reversed.
AI models have finally become "smart and useful," leading to a surge in Cerebras' business.
Revenue reached $510 million in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 76%. More importantly, it turned around from a loss of $482 million to a profit of $238 million.
In just one year, the turnaround from huge losses to huge profits has made investors extremely uneasy.
The client list has also changed from being dominated by G42 to having multiple clients such as OpenAI, AWS, G42, and MBZUAI operating in parallel.
More importantly, two heavyweight new clients have emerged—
OpenAI has signed a multi-year contract worth over $20 billion, securing 750 megawatts of computing power in Cerebras, to be deployed in phases starting in 2026.
AWS announced the deployment of Cerebras CS-3 chips in its own data centers, making them available to developers through Amazon Bedrock.
In a recent interview, Feldman revealed that during the roadshow, he needed to convince investors of three core points:
First, the demand for reasoning will increase by a million times;
Secondly, computing power cannot be achieved solely through GPUs;
Third, CUDA's competitive advantage has actually been exaggerated.
This time, Cerebras successfully launched its AI IPO, delivering a stunning debut.
OpenAI emerged as a "big winner" after its overnight success during the ASI era.
Cerebras' IPO created a textbook example of a VC exit feast.
These institutions waited a full decade from seed round to the bell-ringing ceremony.
Foundation Capital: From 37 million to 2.8 billion, a 76-fold return.
Foundation Capital invested approximately $37 million, acquiring a 7% stake, which, based on the IPO price of $185, is worth $2.8 billion, representing a 76-fold return.
Based on the closing price of $311 on the first day, it is approximately $4.8 billion.
Benchmark: 268 million → 3.3 billion, a 12x return
Benchmark also invested in the Series A round in 2016, led by general partner Eric Vishria.
It invested a total of $268 million, holding an 8.1% stake. The IPO price corresponded to $3.2 billion, a 12-fold return. Based on the closing price, it soared to $5.5 billion.
Eclipse Capital: From 146.5 million to 2.5 billion, a 17-fold return.
Eclipse Ventures invested $146.5 million, acquiring a 6.2% stake. The IPO price corresponded to $2.5 billion, a 17-fold return.
The story of Eclipse is even more legendary, as the person who made the investment decision was Pierre Lamond, a 95-year-old veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor.
Lamond had previously invested in Feldman's former company, SeaMicro, while at Khosla Ventures, before joining Eclipse.
A year after Cerebras was founded in 2016, he decided to invest again. This was tantamount to the Silicon Valley chip guru giving Cerebras his own approval.
He once said in 2017, "Feldman is probably one of the few entrepreneurs I would invest in twice."
Ultraman: 10x "passive income", 1 cent investment
Of all the VC returns, OpenAI's is the most outrageous!
Let's start with Auerman himself.
According to the leaked court documents, Altman personally invested in Cerebras as early as February 2017, before ChatGPT even existed.
As of the end of 2025, he held 89,373 shares, which were worth approximately $3.2 million at the time.
On the first day of trading, the value of these shares soared to approximately $30 million.
This money quietly multiplied tenfold.
Previously, OpenAI had considered acquiring Cerebras directly.
Although the acquisition deal fell through, the two parties reached a "mysterious agreement" on Christmas Eve.
In the next few years, if OpenAI purchases billions of dollars worth of inference computing resources from Cerebras, it could acquire up to 11% of the shares.
OpenAI paid less than one cent per share for these shares.
With its IPO price set at $185, the value of OpenAI shares skyrocketed. Current estimates put OpenAI's paper profit at approximately $1.8 billion.
It's worth mentioning that Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, also held approximately 77,000 shares of Cerebras in his personal capacity.
Based on the closing price of $311, Brockman's personal holdings were worth approximately $24 million.
Technological trump card: A chip the size of a dinner plate
As is well known, Cerebras' core weapon is the WSE-3 (Wafer Scale Engine 3).
A single chip occupies the entire 300mm wafer, with an area of 46,225 square millimeters, roughly the size of a dinner plate.
A typical chip is about 800 square millimeters, while the WSE-3 is nearly 60 times larger.
In terms of parameters, the WSE-3 achieves overwhelming superiority.
4 trillion transistors (19 times that of Nvidia B200)
900,000 AI optimization cores
125 petaflops of AI computing power (28 times that of B200)
5nm process, manufactured by TSMC
While others are using "multi-GPU parallel processing" to solve computing power problems, Cerebras directly turns an entire wafer into a giant processor.
Behind this violent aesthetic lies a key judgment: reasoning is the future battlefield for AI.
Training a large model might only require one attempt.
But inference—which involves the model answering every question and executing every agent task—is a continuous and relentless consumption of computing power.
Cerebras claims that their inference speed is 10 to 20 times faster than Nvidia GPU clusters.
AI IPO Tsunami Poised to Unleash $3 Trillion
It's important to understand that the Cerebras IPO was just the appetizer.
The real highlight is yet to come—
SpaceX (including xAI) : Roadshow as early as June, with a valuation target of $1.75 trillion, and plans to allocate 30% to retail investors, which is unprecedented in IPO history.
If successful, it will be the largest IPO in human history.
OpenAI aims for a Q4 2026 IPO with a valuation of $1 trillion.
It just completed the largest single private equity funding round in history, raising $122 billion. However, it is projected to generate $13.1 billion in revenue and suffer losses of up to $14 billion by 2025, and will not turn a profit until 2030.
Anthropic : Plans to go public in October, has already secured $30 billion in funding, has a valuation of $900 billion, and its IPO fundraising may exceed $60 billion.
According to the latest data, its annualized revenue has soared from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $44 billion.
The three companies are valued at over $3 trillion.
Fortune made a bold statement: "SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could either revitalize the IPO market or drain it dry."
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If the three companies go public within six months, their combined fundraising could exceed $240 billion, surpassing the total annual IPO fundraising in the United States in most recent years.
The Final Battle: When Capital Begins to Bet on ASI
But if you think Wall Street is just betting on a chip company's financial statements, you're being naive.
Looking at the longer timeline, the Cerebras story reveals a deeper logic: capital is betting on ASI in advance.
Back in 2017, Greg Brockman wrote a sentence in an email to the OpenAI team:
Exclusive access to Cerebras hardware will give OpenAI an overwhelming computing power advantage over Google.
At that time, ChatGPT did not exist, and LLM was still a concept in academic papers, but the core team of OpenAI already knew one thing clearly:
The path to AGI and even ASI will ultimately be a computing power arms race. Today, in 2026, this prediction is being frantically validated.
The real bet in this IPO has never been just on the price-to-earnings ratio of a single company.
It's betting on the next kind of intelligence that humanity is building. And this kind of intelligence requires a computing power far beyond what anyone can imagine today.
When capital begins to value a 10-year-old chip company at $66 billion, when OpenAI is willing to spend $20 billion just to secure 1/40 of its computing power gap, when SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic line up for trillion-dollar IPOs—
This is human civilization laying the foundation for the arrival of superintelligence.
Whoever lays the foundation first wins the ticket to the ASI era. Whoever watches from the sidelines will forever remain a spectator.
