Cerebras Systems made a stunning stock market debut on Thursday, with shares of the artificial intelligence chipmaker surging as much as 109% above its IPO price as investor appetite for AI-linked plays showed no sign of cooling.
The company's shares opened at $350, against an IPO price of $185, before trading around $310 by midafternoon.
Cerebras raised $5.55 billion in an upsized offering that ranks among the most closely watched technology listings of the year.
The debut values Cerebras well above the $8.1 billion valuation it received just eight months ago, underscoring the intensity of investor demand for companies tied to the rapid expansion of AI tools and services.
Cerebras builds computer systems for AI deep learning applications and has emerged as one of the highest-profile challengers to Nvidia's dominance in AI computing. Its flagship Wafer-Scale Engine 3 processor uses an entire silicon wafer as a single supersized chip, which the company says makes it 58 times larger than leading GPU chips and capable of delivering inference speeds up to 15 times faster on certain open-source AI models, while using significantly less power per unit of compute.
Rather than competing across the broader semiconductor market, Cerebras has carved out a position around extremely large-scale AI workloads, an area drawing increasing attention as developers race to build ever-larger and more sophisticated models.
The IPO drew strong backing from major Wall Street banks, with Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS acting as lead book-running managers.