Cerebras shares drop 10% after biggest tech IPO since Uber

Cerebras Systems shares fell 10% Friday after a huge Nasdaq debut that raised $5.55 billion and valued the AI hardware firm at about $95 billion.

Cerebras Systems shares fell 10% Friday in their first full day of trading, pulling back after one of the largest U.S. technology listings in years.

The AI hardware company sold 30 million shares in its initial public offering, raising $5.55 billion. Its stock had closed Thursday at $331.07 a share after beginning at $185, a debut that gave Cerebras a market capitalization of about $95 billion.

The listing was the biggest technology IPO since Uber went public in 2019, according to the captured CNBC report. Its scale immediately put Cerebras in the center of investor debate over how much value the public market is willing to assign to companies tied to the artificial intelligence buildout.

Cerebras sells large computer chips and AI systems designed to train and run AI models faster than traditional graphics processing units. Its flagship product, the Wafer Scale Engine 3, is built from an entire silicon wafer rather than from many smaller chips. The company says the technology can run faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.

Still, the sharp Friday drop underscored caution around the company’s long-term prospects. Davidson analysts, writing ahead of the market debut, called the product “niche-y” and said investors should not get too excited even if the IPO was well received. They said the wafer-scale technology remains in the “early stages of maturity” and may be less flexible than existing AI chip systems, even if it delivers higher speed in some uses.

The IPO also created large paper stakes for Cerebras leaders. CEO Andrew Feldman’s holding was worth $3.2 billion after the debut, while Chief Technology Officer Sean Lie’s stake was worth $1.7 billion.

Feldman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Cerebras had become mature enough to “access the public markets,” adding that the company has “tremendous opportunities for growth” and that the IPO was the right way to fund that expansion.

Friday’s trading leaves investors weighing two competing signals: a powerful public-market debut for an AI chip challenger, and immediate pressure on the stock as questions remain about how broadly Cerebras’ technology can compete in the AI infrastructure market.