On Thursday, shares of Sunnyvale, California-based AI chipmaker Cerebras went public and nearly doubled in the moments after it opened on the Nasdaq at $185 per share. It closed out the day at $311 per share marking a 70% increase in the price of the stock, giving it a $95 billion market cap, and making it the largest IPO of the year so far.
For investors desperate to get more AI exposure — the IPO was 20 times oversubscribed — this is one of the biggest new plays in the public markets, alongside chipmaker Nvidia.
“This thing is flying … partly because there are so few ways for public investors, whether retail or institutional, to invest in this,” Chris Buskirk, co-founder and chief investment officer of 1789 Capital, an early investor in the company told me.
Cerebras makes specialized high-power chips, most notably 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 arrived at a pivotal moment, with AI becoming a key point of leverage in discussions with China amid President Trump’s visit to Xi Jinping in Beijing this week.
“American companies are excellent but the Chinese companies are very good — well capitalized with very talented people,” Buskirk said. “It’s going to be the American AI tech stack or the Chinese AI tech stack that will proliferate not just in our own countries, but around the world and that’s something we absolutely have to win.”
In that context, Cerebras’ listing may be even more significant geopolitically than financially. The IPO serves as a timely reminder of how America is building both the hardware and software foundation to maintain AI dominance edge and how eager China is to get American chips.
But investors say the company doesn’t just underscore America’s commanding AI hardware advantage — its deep ties across the Middle East are actively expanding US technology influence at a time China is aggressively trying to dominate the region.
“This is the existential geopolitical race of our time,” Buskirk adds.
That’s on full display in the Gulf. In 2025, Cerebras relied on two UAE customers for 86% of its $510 million in revenue. Those ties have drawn scrutiny and even led to a national security review from CFIUS that delayed the chip maker’s listing (UAE-based G42 has an investment portfolio that included Chinese tech 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 did everything they could to push our allies in the Middle East away from us into China’s arms… It was the Biden administration that was pushing them into China’s arms. The Trump administration is bringing them back into alignment with the United States.” — Buskirk told me.
“Everybody needs to adopt AI technology — every company, every country needs to do it. And there’s only two choices. Do you align with the United States AI stack or align with the Chinese tech stack?”
And speed, at this moment, is everything — because computing power has become the defining constraint on AI’s growth.
“Compute is the new bottleneck,” said Buskirk. “Software can scale infinitely — that’s why people loved to invest in [Software as a Service] companies. But the amount of compute that’s necessary for AI is many orders of magnitude larger.”
Cerebras has also secured a major strategic investment and compute partnership from OpenAI, which some critics dismiss as a circular deal that only inflates the AI bubble.
Buskirk rejected that view, arguing the arrangement is a practical necessity: “They can’t deploy their models at scale unless there are leading-edge chip companies that have enough scale to deliver chips to them.”
The company has also drawn scrutiny for its ties to the Pentagon — which Buskirk says is actually a good thing.
“The US government should be buying the absolute best leading-edge technology from American companies at all times,” he told me. “And Cerebras is one of those companies.”
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