- Cerebras, the AI chipmaker, saw its shares nearly double on the Nasdaq, closing up 70% with a market capitalization of $95B.
- Cerebras’ powerful chips are key to the US-China AI technology race.
- Chris Buskirk, founder and chief investment officer of 1789 Capital, a key investor in Cerebras, says the company’s IPO is nationally significant.
On Thursday, shares of Sunnyvale, California-based AI chipmaker Cerebras went public and nearly doubled in the session after opening on the Nasdaq at $185 per share. It closed the day at $311 per share marking a 70% increase in the stock price, giving it a market cap of $95 billion, and making it the biggest IPO of the year so far.
For investors wishing to get more exposure to AI – the IPO was oversubscribed 20 times – this is one of the biggest new plays on the public markets, alongside chip maker Nvidia.
“This thing is flying … because there are few ways for public investment, whether retail or institutional, to invest in this,” Chris Buskirk, founder and chief investment officer of 1789 Capital, an early investor in the company told me.
Cerebras makes special high-powered chips, especially the Wafer Scale Engine, the largest chip ever produced with a processor the size of an entire silicon wafer and 19 times more computing power than Nvidia’s flagship chip.
The IPO comes at a crucial time, with AI becoming a key talking point with China during President Trump’s visit to Xi Jinping in Beijing this week.
“American companies are very good but Chinese companies are very good – they have a lot of money and talented people,” Buskirk said. “It will be the American AI technology stack or the Chinese AI technology stack that will expand not only in our countries, but globally and that’s something we have to overcome.”
In that context, the listing of Cerebras may be more geopolitical than political. The IPO serves as a timely reminder of how America is building both the hardware and software base to maintain the edge of AI dominance and how willing China is to acquire American chips.
But investors say the company isn’t just emphasizing America’s advantage in AI hardware — its deep ties to the Middle East are actively expanding the influence of American technology at a time when China is aggressively trying to dominate the region.
“This is the political race of our time,” added Buskirk.
That is on full display in the Gulf. By 2025, Cerebras relies on two UAE customers for 86% of its $510 million revenue. That relationship drew scrutiny and even led to a national security review from CFIUS that delayed the chipmaker’s listing (UAE-based G42 has an investment portfolio that includes Chinese technology companies).
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But investors argue the relationship ultimately strengthens influence in areas China wants to control.
“During the Biden administration, the US government has done everything possible to push our allies in the Middle East away from us into the arms of China… – Buskirk told me.
“Everybody needs to use AI technology – every company, every country needs to do it. And there are only two choices. Do you go with the AI stack of the United States or go with the Chinese technology stack?”
And speed, at the moment, is everything – because computing power has been the defining barrier to the growth of AI.
“Compute is the new bottle,” says Buskirk. “Software can grow infinitely – that’s why people like to invest in it [Software as a Service] companies. But the amount of computing required for AI is many orders of magnitude larger. “
Cerebras has also received a large strategic investment and computing partnership from OpenAI, which some critics dismiss as a circular deal that only inflates the AI bubble.
Buskirk rejected that idea, saying the program was a practical necessity: “They can’t use their models at scale unless there are leading chip companies with enough scale to deliver chips to them.”
The company also took a closer look at its relationship with the Pentagon — which Buskirk says is actually a good thing.
“The US government must be buying the best technology from American companies all the time,” he told me. “And Cerebras is one of those companies.”
