A wave of expected initial public offerings of artificial intelligence companies started with a bang on Thursday.
Cerebras, a Silicon Valley maker of A.I. chips, opened trading of its shares on the stock market at $350, far above its I.P.O. price of $185, before closing the day up 68 percent at $311.07. That put the company’s value at $67 billion. In the week leading up to its market debut, Cerebras had lifted its offering price twice from a preliminary $115 and increased the number of shares it made available to investors, raising at least $5.6 billion for itself.
That made Cerebras the largest public offering so far this year and the biggest tech debut globally since 2019, said Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, which follows I.P.O.s.
“The A.I. I.P.O. boom is really starting to happen now,” he said.
Cerebras presages a series of potential “mega I.P.O.s” from A.I.-related firms including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker, which owns his A.I. initiatives, has valued itself at more than $1 trillion and could go public as soon as next month. OpenAI and Anthropic, which have developed foundational A.I. models and tools like chatbots, are also eagerly anticipated by investors. All of them could be among the biggest I.P.O.s to date.
These companies would reach the stock market amid a frenzy over A.I., which is transforming everything from software coding to geopolitics. Tech giants including Google, Meta and Microsoft are pouring billions into building data centers to power A.I. development and some are working with OpenAI and Anthropic to win the technology contest.
The mania has catapulted Nvidia, which is the biggest maker of A.I. chips, into position as the world’s most valuable public company. Cerebras is among the companies trying to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.