Cerebras Just Rocketed Onto the Nasdaq. The Biggest IPO of 2026 Isn’t a Buy Here.

Nauman Khan

Tue, May 19, 2026 at 9:00 AM EDT 4 min read

The AI infrastructure boom just delivered its loudest market debut yet. Cerebras Systems (CBRS), the chipmaker behind a processor roughly the size of a dinner plate, began trading on May 14 under the CBRS ticker. But CBRS stock didn’t just open — it exploded. After pricing at $185 following two upward revisions to its initial public offering (IPO) range, shares began trading at $350 and finished the session at $311.07, giving the company a market value of roughly $95 billion. The $5.55 billion raise instantly became the largest IPO of 2026, surpassing every other listing this year.

The AI chip sector has been surging for months, with semiconductor exchange-traded funds (ETFs) delivering triple-digit gains as hyperscalers and AI labs race to secure more computing power. Cerebras is stepping directly into that momentum, claiming inference speeds up to 15 times faster than traditional GPU clusters.

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The big question now is whether the company can justify its eye-popping first-day valuation.

Cerbras Systems Is a Different Kind of Chip Company

Cerebras is not a conventional chipmaker. The company builds wafer-scale processors, which means it turns an entire silicon wafer into one giant chip. That design is aimed at inference, the part of AI that runs already-trained models.

Management says the setup can deliver inference speeds that are far ahead of traditional GPU clusters. That pitch matters because the AI race is not just about training models anymore. It is also about running them cheaply and quickly at scale.

That is where CBRS stock gets tricky. At its May 14 closing price, Cerebras was valued at nearly $95 billion against 2025 revenue of $510 million. That implies a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of roughly 186.3 times, which is a very demanding number by any standard.

For context, Nvidia (NVDA) trades at about 26.4 times sales while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) trades at 21.1 times sales. So, Cerebras is not just expensive. It is priced as though almost everything will go right from here.

The first-day frenzy also showed how much demand was chasing the deal. The order book was reportedly oversubscribed more than 20 times, and the company had to raise its range twice before pricing above the top end. That kind of response can support a stock in the near term. It can also leave very little margin for error.