Cerebras Systems, an American artificial intelligence chipmaker with extensive ties to the United Arab Emirates, made a dramatic debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange on May 15, 2026, with its stock opening nearly 90 percent above its initial public offering price before closing at $311 per share. The stock opened at $350 per share from the set price of $185, rising to $385 before closing at $311, with the company raising $5.55 billion late on Wednesday from 30 million shares via its initial public offering, the largest of the year so far.
The company took a winding path to going public, partially as a result of its close ties with Emirati artificial intelligence and cloud computing holding company G42, withdrawing a first filing in October 2025 after raising more than $1 billion and clearing a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States over G42’s $40 million investment in 2021 and long-term purchase commitments. By December 2025, G42 had divested that one percent ownership stake according to news reports, though it remained one of Cerebras’ largest customers, accounting for 87 percent of revenue in the first half of 2024. That dependency on the UAE company fell to 24 percent of revenue last year, according to its new IPO filing. At the same time, Cerebras significantly expanded its relationship with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a state-backed institution in Abu Dhabi, which comprised 62 percent of revenues and nearly 78 percent of receivables in 2025.
The IPO put Cerebras’ overall valuation at nearly $50 billion according to Bloomberg, more than five times the $8 billion it hit in September, with the company’s valuation surpassing $100 billion in trading on Thursday before closing at about $86 billion. Mohammed Soliman, director at McLarty Associates in Washington, described the IPO as a clear referendum on what he called the artificial intelligence supercycle, noting that investors are willing to bet big on specialized chip architectures that promise to challenge Nvidia’s dominance even as broader market concerns about an artificial intelligence spending bubble persist. With an order backlog almost equivalent to its market value and recent multi-billion-dollar agreements to supply compute power to OpenAI and Amazon Web Services, Cerebras reported $510 million in 2025 revenue, an almost 76 percent annual increase, signalling that the company’s commercial momentum extends well beyond its UAE-linked customer base as it positions itself as a serious long-term rival to Nvidia in the market for specialized artificial intelligence hardware.
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