Cerebras makes the largest computer chip ever sold, a single square of silicon about 8.5 inches across. Every other chipmaker cuts a wafer into hundreds of small chips. Cerebras keeps the wafer whole, so data never has to leave the chip. Its first IPO filing, in 2024, stalled while U.S. officials reviewed an investment from G42, its big customer in Abu Dhabi. In May 2026 it finally went public, at the height of the AI boom.

Keeping the Wafer Whole

Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie and Jean-Philippe Fricker founded Cerebras in 2015. Feldman and Lauterbach had built SeaMicro, a server maker sold to AMD. The bet was that AI needed a new kind of chip, and that the fastest design was the biggest one. Cerebras built its Wafer Scale Engine and the CS systems around it. It later sold AI computing as a cloud service and built its own data centers.

Opened at $350

Cerebras first filed its S-1 in September 2024, then pulled it and raised money privately. It came back in 2026, priced its IPO at $185 a share, and sold 30 million shares for $5.55 billion. The stock began trading on Nasdaq as CBRS on May 14, 2026, opened at $350, and ended the day up about 68 percent. In August 2026 it introduced the CS-4 system. Cerebras trades on Nasdaq.

Cover: The Thinker, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a thinker (the brain, cerebrum).