GoKawiilCerebras Systems' monster debut on Thursday didn't just place it among tech's biggest-ever IPOs — it was a crystal clear signal of unstoppable demand for chips to power AI, as tech giants scramble to find alternatives to the costly, sold-out graphics processing units made by Nvidia.
Cerebras closed its first day trading on Wall Street with a market cap just below $100 billion, putting it near the few companies to close above that mark, such as Facebook-parent Meta and Alibaba. The stock closed 10% lower on Friday, its first full day of trading.
Here's what you need to know about this hot Nvidia competitor.
Cerebras makes a different type of chip than the classic Nvidia GPU, and it's the size of a dinner plate.
"We build the biggest chips in the semiconductor industry," Cerebras CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Feldman told CNBC on Squawk Box Thursday. "Big chips process more information in less time and deliver results more quickly."
Until now, Nvidia has been winning the AI chip race because its GPUs serve as general-purpose workhorses, excelling at the parallel math necessary for training large models. But we've now arrived at the era of agentic AI, where inference is key. While training teaches the AI model to learn from patterns in large amounts of data, inference uses the AI to make decisions based on new information.